Monday, October 12, 2020

Christopher Columbus? Forgeddaboutit!

I used to enjoy Columbus Day. 

As a kid, it was a nice little break in the school action. The weather was generally good. My father was off of work - it was very much a holiday for all back then - and we'd take a ride. Or rake leaves. Or both. 

When I was first in the workforce, it was still a widely-observed holiday, but over the years it drifted off into one of those optional days that you could use another time. 

And then we all learned a bit more about Christopher Columbus, and Columbus Day became a negative. 

For a while, I thought the holiday should be rebranded as Immigrants Day. But I'm past that, and I'm now completely in favor of celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day. (I still think we could use an Immigrants Day...)

Yet I feel a bit sorry for Italian Americans, for whom this holiday has historically been about ethnic pride. But not sorry enough to feel badly that protestors went "off with his head" to a statue of Columbus located in Christopher Columbus Park on Boston's waterfront.


Sorry, Cristobal, but if we expect Southerners to get rid of Robert E. Lee, it's time for you to go, too.

Boston's Italian-American community - who  paid to erect this statue: the base bears the names of many of Boston's most prominent It-Am families - was expecting the statue to be restored. But nah.

The base remains, but the statue is not making a return. The head will be re-attached to the body, and the Knights of Columbus are going to find a place for it in the North End, Boston's Italian section.


I walked by it the other day, and it looks a bit forlorn.

They're  planning to replace it a monument dedicated to Italian immigrants. Which is as it should be. As long as they don't use the same sculptor who did Boston's Irish Famine Memorial, which is plunked in front of a Walgreen's in downtown Boston. 

Okay, there's another part to this memorial, depicting a proud and prosperous Irish-American family who made it in America. Still, I find the statue of the "before" scene pretty ghastly. 

Not that anyone's asking me, but how about a statue of a family coming down the gangplank, getting off the boat that brought them here. A bit worn down from a long trip in steerage. A bit frayed around the edges: they're poor.  A bit nervous about coming to the new land where they didn't know the language, and may not have known anyone period. They're hanging on to each other, looking for a familiar or at least welcoming face in the crowd. But standing tall, and ready to take things on and become Americans. 

Christopher Columbus? Forgeddaboutid!

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Here's last year's salute to this quasi-holiday.


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