Now they’re trashing Christopher Columbus! Schools are taking him out of his historic context and making him a bad guy.
A kindergarten class in Florida talked about “how he was very, very mean, very bossy,” and elementary students in Pennsylvania put Columbus on trial charged with “misrepresenting the Spanish crown and thievery.” He was found guilty as charged.
His “meanness” seems based on his relationship with the indigenous population. It would have been a good time to remind kids that Indians didn’t fare any better when the Puritans hit our shores some 150 years later. Europeans then were convinced that theirs was a higher culture and, besides, they were under religious imperative to convert “savages” to Christianity. So was Columbus.
An associate dean at Texas A&M; says Columbus couldn’t have discovered America because people were already here. True, but if you don’t know what’s here isn’t it possible to discover it? As for misrepresenting the Spanish crown, any land occupied by “savages” was fair game. We’re still doing it to our Indians, isolating them on reservations which means on land no one else wants.
Columbus actually accomplished something. Our modern culture seems bent to level the exceptional and make our heroes “just another Joe” like the rest of us. What have our athletes, film stars or rap stars actually accomplished and will it be remembered some 500 or 600 years from now?
I give you the football ace who shot himself in the leg when he tucked a loaded pistol into the waistband of his sweatpants. Or there’s the “OctoMom” who conceived and delivered eight babies. They both may have redeeming characteristics — love their mothers, never mistreat babies or small animals and go to church every Sunday, but what have they really done?
We don’t have the perspective of history to judge them and when history marches on, future generations may never have heard of them. Their moments of fame are merely a blip in time.
Maybe Columbus had his faults, but it took real courage to sail off into the sunset when most of the world thought he was going to fall off the end of a flat earth. I’d say his memory is worth celebrating.
I’m still steamed that we are teaching kids otherwise!
Liz Ciancone
Ms.Takes: Columbus is worth celebrating
- Liz Ciancone
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Somehow, in the vast scheme of things, I have ended up point person for holiday baking.
I know how it happened. Mom was a great cook. I’d give almost anything if I had found her recipe for raisin sugar cookies or the chocolate-orange cake. She turned out coffee cakes, sweet rolls, bread, butterfly rolls and sweet surprises. We always had dessert.
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When I cast my memory back far enough, it seems as if I have always been stage struck.
As a first-grader, I was picked to play a child in the senior class play at Stockton High School. Maybe it was my pigtails? I only knew that I was excused from class early on several afternoons a week so that I could rehearse with the big kids.
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LIZ CIANCONE: Today’s girls have more opportunity than ever
I confess. I had a bit of a battle with the green-eyed monster the other morning. The newspaper had pictures of high school girls playing soccer with a team from another school, and with obvious joy and pleasure.
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Not long ago I ran across an old letter I had written to Dad when I was five years old. He had saved it!
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LIZ CIANCONE: Charter schools won’t solve all of education’s problems
A friend asked me the other day what I thought of Tony Bennett.
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LIZ CIANCONE: Coming to grips with typing technology
I was asked the other day if I still used a typewriter.
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My Best Friend and I opened our third box of tissues Sunday, a BIG box, not your handy, pocket-size job. We added tissues to the shopping list assuming that one or the other of us will soon feel like getting out. I know I’m ready to go someplace, ANYplace, as long as it’s out!
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I’ve heard it said that everyone has a doppleganger — a look-alike — and if that’s true, I suppose that somewhere in the world is a person who looks enough like me to be mistaken for me. Maybe it would take a dim light, or a vivid imagination, but for what it’s worth …
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