Anyway, I REALLY hope this actually happens – I’ve signed the petition and love the concept. 

There’s too large and vocal a segment who believe that exploration is intrinsically evil because all the time and money spent on it should be spent solving the problems at home. 

Vocal? Yes. Large? Not really. Every now and then, someone will pop up and criticize the likes of NASA; William Proxmire, the late senator from Wisconsin, gave one of his Golden Fleece awards to NASA for the SETI program (which he later rescinded). 

Then this doesn’t conflict with people in the Americas being against this holiday, just because some of them may not have possibly existed without the arrival of Columbus.  I find this a strange notion anyway tbh.  Somebody else would have come along anyway, just as others had been here before Columbus.

But yes, it’s true that Columbus Day was really an Italian-American pride day, which made more sense when they were viewed with the same prejudice that hispanics are now and not so much now when they are fully assimilated.

It’s kind of hypocritical to criticize the event that led to you existing, even like all historical contingencies it led to lots of other people not existing in the present because their ancestors were killed or displaced.

This, if true, would imply that I’m a hypocrite if I criticize anything occurring in my past light cone. I actually do believe that all human beings are moral hypocrites so that isn’t even all that implausible, but it’s certainly not going to stop me from criticizing, say, Nazism just because I probably wouldn’t have been born if Hitler had never come to power.

How so?  Would you say the same to a child born of rape or some other horrific situation?

Columbus as a personification of ‘discovery’ is particularly contentious because he was *just* so unbelievably despicable, evil and cruel, even for his time, which the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas certainly attest to.

The origins of the holiday in the U.S. are almost exclusively because of Italian Catholics which itself seems to have been somewhat of a response to WASP bigotry toward Catholic immigrants. I won’t even get into the way this holiday helps keep alive harmful myths of superiority, manifest destiny etc. etc…

Lots of bad juju stinking up this holiday.  I’d be happy to see it go.

Either way I think they deserve remembrance more than a guy with bad navigational skills who began the wholesale destruction of their society. They lost their lives, their land and their culture to the European settlers, the least we can do is have a day to acknowledge that.

I’m not saying this isn’t a most worthy endeavour, but the thing about you Americans is that you’ve mythologized your history to make it easily digestible. The Boston Tea Party! Paul Revere rides at midnight: “The British are coming! The British are coming!” Ben Franklin flies a kite during a lightning storm. Ooo-aah. And of course: “In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”

The up side to this sensationalist spin on historical fact is that it produces these iconic images which stick in people’s minds, thus history sticks in people’s minds. The downside is that it makes Columbus part of some sort of Olympian-esque American pantheon. And even if it’s well-documented that Columbus was not a great guy, and that our worship of him is Euro-centric and colonial-imperialist, it’s going to be a tough thing taking him down off that pedestal. 

TLDR, read Joseph Conrad and get back to me.