As an Italian American, I always felt very proud that Christoper Columbus discovered America.  There's usually a big parade in South Philadelphia, where I grew up, and there's even a park named after the famous explorer.  The public school system where I live now does not give the kids a day off and Max has often come home to tell me that they do not teach that Columbus discovered America anymore, I think Leif Ericson is given this honor and rightly so..  Max is half Italian and is affronted by this fact, if only because he doesn't get the day off!  According to Wikipedia, Columbus day became an official federal holiday in 1934. although it says the Americans have celebrated this day since the Colonial period. 

According to Wikipeida, the influx of Catholics in the mid-nineteen century induced discrimination from activists against immigration such as the Ku Klux Klan.  There's a shocker.  The KKK was against immigration... I wonder if they stopped to think where their parents had been born?  But I digress. To help struggling immigrants, Catholics developed organizations to fight discrimination with groups like the Knights of Columbus, a name chosen in part because it saw Christopher Columbus as a fitting symbol of a Catholic immigrant's right to citizenship.

While doing some reading to write this post, I came across disturbing facts about Christopher Columbus, most shocking to me is that it's claimed that he is the founder of slavery in the Americas. 

According to this article, Columbus, in his log, noted:

"They brought us barrels of cotton thread and parrots and other little things which it would be tedious to list, and exchanged everything for whatever we offered them...I kept my eyes open and tried to find out if there was any gold, and I saw that some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose. I gathered from their signs that if one goes south, or around the south side of the island, there is a king with great jars full of it, enormous amounts. I tried to persuade them to go there, but I saw that the idea was not to their liking...They would make fine servants... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

Well, this is kind of a kick in the head to me and further proof that ignorance is certainly bliss. They certainly didn't teach this part of the life of Christopher Columbus to little Italian school children was I was growing up. 

Living and learning is part of growing up, I suppose.  As a 50 year old woman, I also suppose it's time I grew up.  But rather than be serious, I'd rather tell you something funny.  When I was younger, Dean Martin used to host celebrity roasts.  I loved them, and loved all of that silly humor.  Red Buttons did a skit and I've always remembered it and laughed.  He said that Christoper Columbus, while trying to convince Queen Isabella to let him explore said... "the world is round, you're the only one who's flat"! 

Rather than enslaving the indigenous people Columbus came across, I would have much rather he'd left them laughing.  And free.