Post 216 - October 13, 2020

Day 216…

It rained all day yesterday and it’s still raining now.

The cable news stations this morning are all concentrated on the hearings for the President’s Supreme Court nominee and I just can’t watch.

I tuned in for about five minutes and had to listen to a Republican Senator grandstand while the nominee just sat there. Silent. They aren’t interested in what her views are, they just want to project what they think, themselves, onto her.

Johnson & Johnson just halted its stage three trials of a COVID-19 vaccine because of an unexplained illness in one of its subjects. They are the second company to have to do that. A week ago, AstraZeneca stopped their trials as well because of a neurological issue that developed in one of its volunteers. The two other companies in the United States with vaccine trials are still moving ahead.

There is nothing about either of these pauses that is ominous or questionable. This is what happens when you try and develop a vaccine. After all, nearly forty years in, there is still not a vaccine for HIV. It’s just not that easy.

Yesterday was Columbus Day.

The parade down Fifth was cancelled because of the coronavirus. The steady rain would have made it miserable anyway.

Columbus, like many other historical figures these days is undergoing a re-evaluation of his place in history. He's not being erased as some might claim. He is, instead, being re-aligned into the historical timeline by confronting all of the facts about his life, not just the ones that people want to hear.

Here in this country, we all grew up knowing that in “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Unfortunately, you could also say, “In fourteen hundred and ninety-three Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.” I could never be fully sure which one it was. For the record, it’s the former.

Italian Americans are taking the dismantling of the myth that has grown up around the man personally which, honestly, doesn’t make that much sense to me. There are plenty of people of Italian heritage to be proud of. Lifting Columbus up out of that august group as being the greatest of them all does a tremendous disservice to all of the others.

Christopher Columbus was a man of his time. He was stubborn, ambitious and somewhat ruthless. In short, he was a man.

528 years ago, Christopher Columbus, after travelling east across the Atlantic Ocean, landed in the Bahamas. While he explored the coasts of Central and South America and what is now Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he never actually set foot on North America.

The first European who set foot on this continent was likely Leif Eriksson a Norseman who was probably born in Iceland somewhere between 960 and 970 A.D. His father was Erik the Red who founded the first European settlement on what we now call Greenland.

There are all sorts of conflicting historical accounts, but most agree that Eriksson ended up in Norway where he served in the court of King Olaf I Tryggvason who converted him to Christianity. The King then tasked him with spreading the word across Greenland to the settlers who were now living there.

Either because he had heard of land there, or because he got blown off course (accounts differ), Leif Eriksson probably ended up landing in what is now Nova Scotia a full half of a millennium before Columbus made his crossing.

In 1963, ruins of an 11th-century Viking settlement were discovered at L’Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland. It is now a UNESCO World Historic Site and definitely on my bucket list.

By 1492, most educated Europeans believed that the world was round. Columbus is often portrayed as being the only person who knew the truth in a sea of ignorance, which is not true. What Christopher Columbus was trying to prove was that it was possible to sail to the wealthy lands to the east by heading west. His deal with the Spanish monarchy guaranteed him 10% of anything that he discovered and the right of governorship over any new lands he encountered.

While he certainly believed that the world was round, he badly miscalculated just how large a planet we are on.

When he landed in the Caribbean, he came into contact with the Taino people who were living there. In his diary he wrote of them, “They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features …They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron …They would make fine servants … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

He sent 500 enslaved Taino people back to Queen Isabella who was horrified and refused to accept them. She believed that they were Spanish subjects as the lands Columbus had “discovered” were now Spanish and, therefore, could not be enslaved.

Columbus had left his two brothers in charge of the settlements in the New World as he traveled back and forth to Spain. During one of his absences, the colonists had staged a bloody revolt against them for their mismanagement and incompetence, and the Spanish crown had to send somebody else back to take over.

It is estimated that when Columbus landed in the Bahamas that there were about 250,000 Taino people living in the islands. Sixty years later, their numbers were down to only a few hundred. Forced to work on plantations and dig for gold by the invaders and exposed to new European diseases, they couldn’t survive.

Christopher Columbus’s journeys began an era of exploration and colonization in the New World that have led us to where we are now.

The legacy of his voyages is not so easy to quantify as our history lessons in school would have us believe. We can’t take his very real accomplishment of proving nay-sayers wrong by successfully sailing across the Atlantic Ocean while ignoring the equally real consequences that resulted. Christopher Columbus, whether he knew it or not, heralded a genocide that leaves the Nazi’s in the dust. Native American were pushed off their lands and massacred by the millions as Europeans moved in.

All of the historical figures we venerate are just people living in the times that they lived in.

Our Founding Fathers owned slaves. Even Mother Theresa was just a person - by some accounts prickly and driven and well aware of her public image.

In his Columbus Day proclamation this morning the President announced, “I have also taken steps to ensure that we preserve our Nation’s history and promote patriotic education.  In July, I signed another Executive Order to build and rebuild monuments to iconic American figures in a National Garden of American Heroes.  In September, I announced the creation of the 1776 Commission, which will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and honor our founding.  In addition, last month I signed an Executive Order to root out the teaching of racially divisive concepts from the Federal workplace, many of which are grounded in the same type of revisionist history that is trying to erase Christopher Columbus from our national heritage.  Together, we must safeguard our history and stop this new wave of iconoclasm by standing against those who spread hate and division.”

Nobody is trying to erase Christopher Columbus from our history. His voyages are why many of us are here today. There is, however, a very real cost to our occupation of this land and we should not ignore that. Our history has already been revised. It is that revision which people are trying to undo.

The land that I can see from my apartment window was occupied by the Canarsee people who were part of the greater Lenape tribe. Famously, Peter Minuit and his fellow Ditch colonists acquired the title to it by bartering goods worth about $24. It is unlikely that the Canarsee people knew what the transaction truly meant to the Europeans as their culture did not have a concept of land ownership.

President Benjamin Harrison declared October 12, 1892 a one-time Columbus Day after 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans. It was part of a wider effort to placate Italian immigrants across the nation after the brutal murders.

In 1934, The Knights of Columbus lobbied Congress to officially recognize the day. Further attacks on immigrants by the Ku Klux Klan prompted them to want to shed light on the accomplishments of immigrants, particularly Italians, in the United States. President Franklin Roosevelt did indeed make the proclamation that the day should be celebrated every year, but it did not become an official federal holiday until 1968.

Yesterday, in the rain, I walked down to Columbus Circle.

For the last few months the circle has been barricaded and under 24/7 guard by the NYPD.

The day before yesterday, there were three Native Americans standing across the street from the statue of Columbus. One was wearing a mask that said, “No one is legal on Stolen Land.” Chalk outlines of fallen bodies had been drawn on the pavement with numbers inside them. Numbers of Native American who had perished. Numbers of enslaved Africans who had been brought over. Enormous numbers.

The rain may have washed away those chalk markings yesterday but, they nonetheless, still represent part of the truth about our history.

It is not the job of history to exalt the past, no matter what our President might say.

There is the saying that history belongs to the victors. I would argue that what belongs to the victors is the power to bend and cherry-pick history to support their legitimacy.

The Knights of Columbus have done much to support the very real contributions of Italian immigrants to our society. They might do well to start thinking about a name change that doesn’t put the weight of generations of accomplished people on the shoulders of one, merely human, man.

None of us are saints. None of our history is free from controversy. For someone to win, somebody else has to lose.

I was very excited, yesterday, to finally be able to go to the bank and to the post office. Of course, I had completely forgotten that it was Columbus Day and they would both be closed.

Today’s a new day. I’m going to go out after I take a shower and try again.

That’s all any of us can do. Keep trying again and again, until we get it right.