Well I did some looking around this morning and it seems
there is a lot of controversy over the celebration of Columbus Day.
I am not a historian, nor have I studied both sides of this
controversy in detail. I am painting with broad brushstrokes here.
There are of course two schools of thought – one says
Columbus brought destruction, greed and death, domination and exploitation to
the Americas. The other says he was a courageous explorer credited with
opening up the Americas.
Columbus’s dichotomy is a very human story. Five hundred
years from now, how will our portraits hold up against the standards of time?
Will they be a type of Dorian Gray composition, a dubious life painted over
with the bright hopeful colors of what we wished to be, or perhaps the other
way, painted as ogre-ish and ugly on the outside by others with no seeing or
understanding of the softer truths of the heart inside? We tend to paint a
picture of Columbus as evil villain or heroic explorer. Take your pick. Which
Columbus would you like for your personal own? And will the real Columbus
please stand up?
The Columbus question can be argued ad nauseum: his voyages to the Americas resulted in
opening up and putting the continent on the map as a place of global
interaction. A new set of nations and countries were brought into recorded history
and entered the world stage as recognized players.
And in the course of that discovery there is the pure human
horror of “man’s inhumanity to man” played out in the ugliness of the cruel
exploitation and extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
This story, our story, the story of the Americas, is not an
uncommon or unrepeated one throughout history. But we have highlighted this part
of history in our home hemisphere for special treatment and attention. And rightly
so. It is our side of the world, our responsibility to look at and learn from.
Perhaps our heightening sense of awareness and social consciousness is fomenting
the need to take a closer look at our societal behaviors and beginnings. Countries, peoples and races have been
overtaking other countries, peoples and races for all of our known human
history. Brutal expungements of entire populations and species have been our
unwitting trail of development in the huge panoply of the struggle for
survival. Even before recorded history the archeology of a region reveals
displacement and usurpment of another’s territory and right to live. Every
single human is responsible for every single act, and every single human is
part of a larger, societal mindset and force that operates through each of its
members to preserve itself.
Is Columbus a hero or a demon? Or both? Even if he was
completely motivated by the lust for gain – remember he was funded to produce
that for Spain – somewhere at his heart he had a big vision. And he worked
desperately hard to bring it to pass. Winning the support of the monarchy in
Spain was his huge break. Everything he had dreamed of and wished for suddenly
had financial legs to stand on and wings to fly with. What a word to us who have
big dreams, ones that in the depths of our hearts seem lustrous and noble,
about the judgment of time and the incalculable effects of momentum and
expansion upon a kernel of creative thought when released into the stream of the
societal consciousness present at its day.
Are we responsible for that very societal consciousness? You
bet we are. Every tiny kernel of it is a thought, belief or action played out
across millions of interactions every day. We are building it all the time, you
and I – not our leaders, not our religions, not our economies – us, just us. We
are the microcosm of the whole, like the atoms and molecules and cells in a
body that determine its health, strength and direction. The whole is a
reflection of the individual one. And so it does come down to
Christopher Columbus
Had a dream
All did not come out
As well, it seems
As the dreamer dreamed the dream.
And so we go
Along each day
Thinking we have no power
To sway
The direction of others,
Unknowing along the way
That we have sown the seeds
Of tomorrow today
