 |
| Stefan Jeremiah |
Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday he wants the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate two Christopher Columbus statues.
He deserves thanks for agreeing to take a long-overdue step to preserve the explorer’s central place in American history and Italian American identity.
It’s a stark contrast from mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, who in 2020 tweeted an image of himself giving a latex-gloved middle finger to Columbus’ statue in Astoria captioned, “Take it down.”
No, Assemblyman. These statues deserve to stand proudly in honor of the New World’s first immigrant and all who followed him.
Italian Americans revere Columbus as a hero because he was one.
He dared to go where others wouldn’t. His contemporaries believed he would perish on the open sea.
Instead, he forever expanded humanity’s horizons. His transatlantic crossing inaugurated the most consequential migration in history.
Columbus set his eyes on a new continent as millions of his countrymen would centuries later. In his voyage, generations of Italian Americans have seen their own.
Like him, they set out for a distant and strange land, often guided by little more than legends. In him, they see the immense courage needed to leave behind everything and risk it all — including their lives — in search of opportunity, progress and prosperity.
Through him, they honor a man of faith, the embodiment of a people who believe in a higher power and are willing to sacrifice for a better future, refusing to be defined by fears and limitations.
Yes, Columbus had flaws, as we all do. To acknowledge his moral complexity and administrative foibles does not deny his greatness.
He was a man of remarkable courage and vision yet not immune to temptation.
But he was no monster. He lived in a harsher and more violent age, in circumstances far removed from our own.
Some of the resulting interactions between Europeans and American Indians were brutal.
Such violence cannot be excused, but neither should it obscure his monumental accomplishments.
Ironically, for well over a century, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks and others have fought to claim Columbus as their own, seeking to crown their cultures with a figure of such world-historical significance.
They’re clamoring to adopt a figure Mamdani and his allies foolishly wish to erase.
If anything, Columbus’ story should remind us to be vigilant for the moral blind spots that exist in every age, including our own.
Columbus’ detractors fail to recognize he reunited the human family after ten millennia of partial isolation. --->READ MORE HERE
President Donald Trump renewed the focus of Columbus Day to be celebrated on the second Monday of October, reclaiming the explorer’s “extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue,” according to the president’s proclamation.
Since 1971, the second Monday in October has been federally recognized as Columbus Day to commemorate Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492, celebrate Italian-American heritage, and acknowledge the 1891 lynchings of 11 Italian Americans. In 2021, former President Joe Biden issued the first presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day to be observed on the same day, following backlash toward Columbus.
The “current hostility to him is ill informed,” Felipe Fernández-Armesto, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Columbus on Himself,” told CNA. “He was understandably conflicted about the people he encountered on this side of the ocean, but, by the standards of his contemporaries, his most characteristic judgments about them were highly positive.”
“Columbus Day is commendable — instituted in expiation of the worst lynching in U.S. history ... Columbus suited a project of national reconciliation because he was, for most of the history of the U.S., a unifying figure.” Fernández-Armesto added: “He should remain so today.”
“He was not guilty of most of the excesses of cruelty that interested enemies at the time and ignorant critics today ascribe to him. His history was uniquely significant: He was genuinely the discoverer of viable routes to and fro across the Atlantic — reconnecting, for good and ill, formerly sundered cultures and enabling the world-transforming exchange of ideas and people, commerce and life-forms,” he said.
“It’s hard to think of anyone whose impact on the hemisphere has been greater,” Fernández-Armesto said. --->READ MORE HEREFollow link below to a relevant story:
GOP lawmaker pushes bill to punish cities that ditched Columbus Day after Trump proclamation
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment