The Sunshine Empire

I was lied to when I was a boy. We all were actually but I was lied to. My parents worked hard to put me through an excellent private Catholic school, and I was lied to. Today some will celebrate Columbus Day here in the United States, but Mr. Columbus was the driving force in my earning a degree in history from The University of Florida. For some reason we tell our children lies about Christopher Columbus, all of which are not even close to the truth, and I’ve had enough.

Every schoolchild in America is told that “in fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” We are told that he both “discovered America” and that he “proved the world was round.” He did neither of those things, not even close. Let’s put aside the obvious fact that North America was teeming with indigenous peoples, and go with the western construct that the first European to arrive “discovered” it. Even then Columbus is not the first European as Leif Ericsson visited North America years before Columbus ever did. Yet it doesn’t even stop there.

When Columbus arrived on the island of Hispaniola (not America), he thought he had arrived in India and this is the reason that Native Americans were known for sometime as “Indians.” The original purpose of the mission was to find a seaborne route from Europe to India that would eliminate the need to go around the tip of Africa. Which brings up the second biggest fallacy of what we are taught in schools as children, that Columbus discovered that the earth was round. The only people that thought the Earth was round were the modern equivalent of our birthtards here in the United States. Astronomers since the time of the ancient Greeks knew that the Earth was round. Even with the naked eye anyone can see that the shadow of the Earth in the moon is round and not a flat line. Any sailor could tell you of seeing a ship’s mast first as it came up above the horizon due to the curvature of the Earth. Yet we continue to honor this man who was foolish enough to think he was in India.

The issue of our Columbus fantasy made me jaded for the rest of my life, and it pushed me to study history. So have your fun and your parades, I feel no need to honor such an overblown legend.