And the rest of time

Columbus Day—I knew it was Thanksgiving Monday in the Great White North (Canada), but I’d forgotten that this Monday also signaled the old national holiday of Columbus, and I went down to the post office to collect my mail—which wasn’t there.

The world has changed in the sixty years since I was a kindergartner, coloring paper cut-outs of Columbus’ three ships—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María—with my classmates at school, and then hanging them up with autumn leaves on the bulletin boards.

White people—Europeans—and men—humans who are born with male genitalia and let that define their gender—have for some time now become personae non gratae in much of the Western world, even though it was us (I am one of them) who set it all up.

I’ve already admitted publicly that I’ve gone over to the camp of those who think that European, Judaeo-Christian humanism is superior to most, if not all, other cultures, and also to the cohort that believes that patriarchy is the natural order of human society.

I’ve only felt a few nit-picks and a pebble or two thrown in my direction by persons whom I have unintentionally offended, and that’s probably because I am an unimportant nobody, so who cares if I’m a retrogressive, ancient man, especially since there’s only one of me.

I don’t write to offend, as those who know me can testify. I write to encourage, to strengthen, those who ‘seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,’ yet strangely I’m no fundamentalist, and I don’t attack people, but I do assault systems. Hate the sin, love the sinner.

Columbus Day is a memorial to me, not of White genocide of the red man, but of the evolution of the race—there’s only one: the human race—in which the law of ‘survival of the fittest’ often mercilessly pushes aside cultures not as technologically or culturally advanced.

Christianity was there, despite its constant detractors, to mitigate the cruelty and wanton devastation, but it was only partly successful, due to the ignorance and moral backwardness of the age in which it tried to do the work of Jesus. After all, the Church is still people.

In the evolution of the race, primitive gives way to advanced. We may seek to preserve some of our ethnic past in the perpetuation of dead languages, folk arts and other cultural relics, and technology helps us do this, but most of us still want to live modern lives of convenience.

In the Americas, south of the Rio Grande, some indigenous peoples were nearly as advanced as the European invaders, and their numbers guaranteed their survival as nations, even overwhelming their conquerors. In Paraguay, most Whites speak Guaraní, an indigenous language.

Christopher Columbus, a man most plagued by human weaknesses, fully endowed with almost all the vices of the age in which he lived, gained nearly nothing in wealth or renown. The continents he ran into by accident were named after another, and he going to his grave believing they were Asia.

Can our current political correctness be depended on to dispense true justice either today or in retrospect to Columbus and to the peoples inhabiting the lands now known as the Americas? I think not. History cannot be revised for good or ill. To try is to throw rocks at gravestones.

Heroic were the feats of Columbus and the European explorers who restored worldwide trade and communication after the demise of the Silk Road. Heroic was the defense of their ancestral home by the indigenous peoples of this land. They both deserve honor, but nothing more.

Truth cannot restore their ancient lands to the red man. Truth also cannot hold the white man, or any man, of today responsible for what was done in the past. The former is a dream only half-believed but exploited for gain in an imaginary lawsuit against those guilty of nothing but the color of their skin.

History has a way of sorting out the survivors from the cynics, irrespective of what forced interpretations hold sway at a given moment in time, and hostages held for ransom can only be held for so long, before the finality of death removes false premises, roots and branches.

The Canadians are right to set aside this day for giving thanks, not only for the year end harvests, but also for all the harvests of these fair continents and islands where old and new worlds were forced to meet, in a cross that begins to transform the whole earth and the rest of time.