EDITORIAL: Celebrate America on Columbus Day

The Washington Times ^ | October 7, 2011 | Editorial

[jazusamo]

There’s no reason to apologize for being the greatest nation on Earth

Over 100 years ago, Columbus Day was known as Discovery Day. President Benjamin Harrison’s Discovery Day proclamation in October 1892 asked the people of the country to “cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer, and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life.” The holiday honored the spirit of the occasion more than the man who made it happen. The holiday did not glorify Christopher Columbus, but all he made possible and what generations of free Americans had made of it.

The laudatory speeches and commemorative events of those times lack sophistication by contemporary standards, but the country was much younger then, and with youth came enthusiasm. The holiday spoke to the values of freedom and individualism, of risk-taking and reward, which had built an emerging industrial giant from a sparsely inhabited wilderness. These values were so fundamental, such self-evident truths, that it was taken for granted they should be honored, praised and revered. The Sons of the American Revolution even sought to have “Discovery Day” declared the “Fourth of July for the world.”

In later decades, when the holiday became known as Columbus Day, it was linked more closely to the explorer himself, and 20th-century critics focused intently on his purported flaws. The great adventurer became the father of slavery, the bringer of genocide and was scorned as an ignoramus who didn’t even know what he discovered. In the 19th century, however, Columbus was regarded as one of the most heroic and significant figures of his or any age. The “Admiral of the Ocean Seas” was celebrated throughout the Americas as a visionary who braved the unknown on a mission of discovery...

[jazusamo]

Amen! Very well said.

[allmost]

I’m a pure bred-American mutt. I’m damn proud of it.

[G Larry]

AND it’s my Grandma’s Birthday!
She’d be 110.
So, I’ll break out the old Red, White, and Blue, and when anybody asks, I’ll tell them it’s Grandma’s Birthday and she was a great supporter of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and actively campaigned for Scoop Jackson!
And Grandma was very proud that she was born on Columbus Day!!!

[trumandogz]

We should be abolishing federal holidays.

[elkfersupper]

As an angry white male, I intend to celebrate 519 years of supposed murder and oppression by angry white men by going to the shooting range and burning a steak.

I might speak with somebody who is not also an angry white male, but I doubt it.

[jazusamo]

That sounds like a winner to me and I’m going to call my son and SIL to suggest that!

[lightman]

And never forget that Columbus’s voyage was a fortunate byproduct of his century’s Islamoterrorism-—Ferdinand and Isabella had expelled the Moors (Moslems) from Spain and were seeking a trade route to the east other than passing through Islamic territory.