Happy Monday! Go to Work!

Today is Monday, October 11th, 2021. The date formerly known as Columbus Day … I think. It might now be called National Indigenous Peoples Day. I can’t keep up. I don’t want to keep up.

Some may think the idea of cancelling Columbus Day is a new development brought on by the clearly collective decision in 2020 to cancel everything from celebrity hosts of The Bachelor to plastic potato heads. But, I vividly recall being dragged outside with my entire class by a professor my Freshman year in college to “commune with nature and learn why we should never celebrate Columbus.” That was 30 years ago.

I remember being confused and perplexed. I didn’t understand the concept of indoctrination at that point in my life. I had this gut instinct that my professor really shouldn’t have been injecting her own opinions into our class. But, no one at 18 speaks up. We are young and impressionable at that age and I recall doing what I was instructed and rubbing at the blades of grass.

“Now, run your fingers through the grass. Feel the pain, feel the pain coming through the Earth of the Native Americans that were forced off their land by your colonizing ancestors.”

I felt foolish, but I ran my fingers through the grass wondering what was going on. Were the lessons I learned in high school about Columbus all lies? What else were lies? Is she lying? This was an ENGLISH professor. She explained she was part Native American and she wanted us to expand the way we thought. But, all I left there feeling was a kind of hollow anxiety that maybe nothing I knew was real.

This has been going on for 30 years and continues today. Except, the lessons start younger and younger.

The more I learned about Columbus and history, the more I saw that everybody is the hero in their own books. We write them often the way we write the stories of our own lives … always casting ourselves as the good guys. That’s a perspective that it takes well into adulthood, if ever, to develop. But, we don’t wait for adulthood. We tell kids, children with no ability to process the duality of man, that everything is a lie and everything about settling this country and who did is it bad and tainted and it leads to this …

Anger, self-loathing, confusion … all spelled out in cancelling with red paint and tearing things down. We don’t want to learn from history anymore, we want it gone. We don’t want to celebrate anymore, we want it GONE. And, no one ever stops to ask … and then what?

None of us, no matter how hard we try, can ever cancel or erase the past. The past is filled with women and men that were flawed but some did great things, brave things and sometimes terrible, terrible things. But, we will never get to see those moments in their entirety as we continue down this path. And, as we decide to cancel everything and everyone in history that did not lead the perfect life or the perfect path, we will slowly erase it all. And, nothing will change. NOTHING.

And, that’s the part that old English professor didn’t include in her lecture to children about how awful Columbus was. She taught a captive class full of children to question and even despise the past they knew. That’s the byproduct of cancelling. So, we won’t stop until it’s all cancelled. Feel better now?

So, Happy Monday … if you get the day off today and you don’t agree with it … go to work!