Day in, day out Columbus was a jerk. So what? Accept the holiday BY SHAY STEWART-BOULEY

Columbus Day has been in our lives a good, long time. But in Portland, it appears some folks want to give Columbus Day the heave-ho and replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day.

For a hot second after hearing this, it sounded like a great idea. Personally, I’ve never cared much for Columbus Day. I’m descended from a people who were forcibly dragged from Africa and compelled to help build a country that in many ways still tries its damndest to oppress us. So, I’m not keen on celebrating the man who "discovered" a new world that was already populated and helped usher in centuries of Europeans plundering land, building plantations and factories over the bones of the slaughtered natives, opening the slave trade, and all that other good stuff.

It seems tantamount to celebrating the life of a criminal. But changing Columbus Day isn’t the answer, no matter how much I’d like it to be.

Because I can’t help but wonder which holiday is next on the hit list. I’m not a big fan of aggressive political correctness because it seems inevitably to lead to a land where everything we know must be changed lest we offend someone.

According to several stories from Maine media outlets this March, Portland School Committee member Jason Toothaker (who’s leading the Indigenous Peoples Day charge in these here parts) says Columbus is a symbol of colonization and many students in the Portland schools are refugees because of various forms of colonization.

Toothaker wants a new day so that we can have a new perspective and look more critically at the impact of Christopher Columbus and others like him in American history.

But here’s our first big problem. Columbus isn’t the only historical figure who turned out not to be as nice as schools taught us he was. Good ole Abe Lincoln comes to mind. So, I guess that means once we’ve gotten rid of Columbus Day, we should move on to President’s Day next. Because you see, we’re taught that Honest Abe freed the slaves. He did, sort of, but that wasn’t his overriding goal. Ending slavery wasn’t a humanitarian move, it was a political one. It was a side effect of the Civil War.

I know Columbus Day is probably downright offensive to many Native Americans. I understand. I really do. After all, Columbus got all this glory for discovering a continent that wasn’t even trying to hide. It was sitting right out there taking up millions of square miles of ocean. He got the glory; the natives got the business end of various firearms for centuries thereafter.

But if we do away with Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day, what are we going to do about Thanksgiving? Once you get beyond the happy story of pilgrims and Indians sharing a meal and giving thanks, you get to the land-grabbing, exploitation, slaughter, and other atrocities. In that context, Thanksgiving could make you feel a little sick, and not because of too much turkey and pie.

I have plenty of African-American friends who refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving because it’s yet another day that serves to remind us of the nastiness that was perpetrated on the native peoples and later us. What the hell did we have to be thankful for? Hundreds of years of oppression?

So, if we want to continue the mad dash toward total political correctness, why not just change Thanksgiving Day to Atonement Day? We’ll dump the cranberries, pumpkin pies, and dressing and just discuss how we continue to benefit today from the plundering of the natives years before. Doesn’t that sound like a nice holiday?

Do I sound flippant about a rather serious matter? Probably, because I am being a bit flip. But that’s to get your attention. My main intent is to point out that if we start changing something like Columbus Day because it’s offensive, even though hardly anyone really celebrates Columbus on that day, we cannot stop there. Because there are plenty of other holidays and events that must offend somebody. And they’ll have to be dealt with, too. And then we’ll be getting time off for guiltdays instead of holidays.

When we run out of holidays, let’s try some other things. How about a return to Prohibition? We’ll ban the sale of alcohol of any kind, anywhere. After all, alcohol is offensive to teetotalers and it’s potentially dangerous to recovering alcoholics. We’ve already turned smokers into complete pariahs, right? Why not the drinkers?

I’ve spent 32 years on the planet as one of the lowest-ranking beings on the social totem pole: an African American woman. To thrive and survive, I learned to pick and choose my battles. Every day, I encounter well-meaning people and not-so-well-meaning people who offend my sensibilities and celebrate rituals that I am less than thrilled about. But you know what? I cannot have everything my way. As my dear departed mother told me often when I was growing up, "People in Hell want ice water."

Let’s deal with the substantive issues before we argue over holiday names.

Shay Stewart-Bouley can be reached at shaybouley@msn.com