Columbus Week, 2025
October 12 is Columbus Day – not indigenous people’s day, or some other non-descript “woke” nonsense, but Columbus Day. Hail Columbus! Christopher Columbus, explorer, privateer, complex individual was a man of his time, the good and the bad. That is something people, especially those who consider themselves our (self-appointed) moral and intellectual betters will not or cannot admit. To do so would give humanity to a man that has become an icon of a society they despise.
Columbus was motivated by adventure and greed, religion and superiority, righteousness, and base desires. In other words, Columbus represents every hero, every mythology, every human. History is made up of men and women who were that: good and bad. They had superior motives, and they had base motives. It is that history that today’s elites seek to eradicate for our collective memory. They will fail.
Western Civilization, the culture that gave us the freedoms we now enjoy and allowed the thoughts which engendered those thoughts to become action, is and was different than anything that came before it. Its eventual amalgamation with Christianity and the basic tenet that individuals are of value in and of themselves was a driving force in what followed over the next 2000 years to our present day.
The balance between individual responsibilities and rights culminated in the Constitution – the very document the National Archives now places a “warning label” upon because the ill-educate of today cannot bear it lest their coddled sensibilities be offended.
Truth be told, however, the elites that foster the iconoclasm of the age, look to replace Western Civilization’s emphasis on the individual with some dystopian iteration of Socialism or Fascism – or worse. The fact socialism, so much in vogue among the elites and those in academe, has never been workable, let alone successful, wherever it was attempted is brushed off with the notion that it hasn’t been done “correctly.” That sentiment bespeaks a dismissal of human nature – both good and bad – that is beyond belief.
Indeed, one component of socialism, the progressive state run by competent benign bureaucrats, has been expanding in this nation for more than 100 years. The bureaucrats we find are neither competent nor benign. They, like all humanity, seek to exert power and expansion of power. Part of that power is the refusal to do the will of the electorate, instead holding that public in contempt. Can we really deny that it is happening almost daily? We think not. The last few years bear it out, and the present administration is ferreting it out.
Columbus and the Western Civilization that spawned him and others are to be lauded because our civilization is to be lauded with all its foibles, with all its inequalities at times and with all its warts. The good brought about through Western thought, its sense of right and wrong, and its respect for the rights that come from being are to be praised and revered.
For those seeking to supplant Western thought and freedoms – while enjoying its benefits – see things with immaturity and stunted self-righteousness that show the narrowness of their world view. Those who are intolerant or need trigger warnings, or, indeed, cannot listen to opposing arguments should not and must not be taken seriously.
Hail Columbus with all his warts and successes; and hail Western and Judeo-Christian values from which sprang most equal society the world has ever known.