Editor, Daily Nexus
To all of you who went out and protested Columbus Day on Monday: Good job, buddy! Your little protest rally managed to disrupt a whole bunch of classes, including one of my sections. Now, let me ask you something — what exactly were you trying to accomplish again? Were you trying to protest the University of California’s celebration of Columbus Day? Because I’ve got news for you all — we don’t celebrate it. You only thought there was no class because you skipped it so that you could go marching around.
I don’t think that anybody can deny that Christopher Columbus committed horrible atrocities. His treatment of the Haitians was appalling, and nobody will argue that what he did in the pursuit of gold was honorable. However, George Washington was a slave owner, and Thomas Jefferson had several concubines. Abraham Lincoln did not believe that slaves were human and used them as a political weapon. Maybe we should protest President’s Day and Independence Day too, you assholes. Hell, I think we should protest Welcome Week next year, because of how it exploits freshmen.
To paraphrase a character from the TV show, “Firefly,” everybody who ever had a statue made of them was some kind of asshole or another. Dislike it all you want, but Christopher Columbus was directly responsible for European colonization of the Americas. Without his voyages, there would have been no Jamestown 100 years later, no British colonies and no United States of America. The tax dollars that pay for your education wouldn’t exist, nor would the fine university that you were so busy protesting on. So if you want to have an “Indigenous Peoples Day,” that’s fine. But don’t forget that none of you would be here today if it weren’t for Columbus, no matter which way you look at it.