Commentary: Still Judging After All These Years

In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. On that much, we can agree. The list of things beyond that which can be stipulated is pretty scarce, but in summary: Someone at some point decided Columbus should get credit for discovering the Americas. Someone else, in turn, decided that was reason enough to declare a holiday on the anniversary of his "discovery." And bingo-bongo, bank cashiers have been big fans of Cristoforo Colombo ever since.

Hopefully none of that's too controversial up to this point, but far be it from me to underestimate America's ever-squishening capacity for offense.

Once Chris happenstanced the Niña, Pinta and Santa Margarita into the Bahamas, however, contemporary society begins to bristle at what happened next. Suffice to say, 15th century sailors did not comport themselves with the standards one would expect at brunch in modern-day Martha's Vineyard.

Which brings us to the shipload of think-pieces that gets disembarked into newsprint every October to condemn Columbus Day for celebrating a racist, misogynistic, imperialist, greedy, homophobic (I'm assuming), gold-mongering beast of a human who should probably be No. 2 on a hit-list of time-machine-assassinations, right after that one guy in Germany. Columbus killed all the Indians and didn't even have the couth to call them "Native Americans" while he did it.

It's not particularly surprising that all the politically correct termites wriggle out of the woodwork once a year to criticize a guy who died 500 years ago; after all, few targets are more ripe than dead white men. And there's no denying that Columbus and his crew did things we would classify today as abhorrent.

But therein lies the problem with all the revisionist outrage. Using today's rubric of "good behavior" to judge the actions of people who had to make do in a world that bears almost no resemblance to today's America isn't just lazy and irrelevant; if we're not careful we end up rewriting the history books just so we feel better about ourselves.

To wit: in this highly advanced nation where our chief concern is what version of iPhone we own, we all agree that slavery is indefensible. But for almost all of human history, that wasn't the case. And for us to besmirch the historical portrait of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson for being slave owners punishes legitimately great figures for simply conforming to society. We like to say they should have known better, but without the last 250 years of history to inform our opinions, how can we possibly know that we would have known better?

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the movie "Back to the Future Part III," when Doc is trying to explain the complexities of time travel to his protege, Marty McFly. Marty questions the validity of Doc's plan for the movie's climax, pointing out that the bridge they need to escape the bad guys doesn't exist yet.

"Marty!" Doc exclaims, "You're just not thinking fourth-dimensionally!"

Time, of course, is the fourth dimension, and it's the only dimension we can conveniently ignore. Ergo, we're really bad at thinking fourth-dimensionally. We're unable to put our modern minds inside the head of a guy who undertook an incredibly dangerous voyage and exploited the natives once he arrived in order to get what he came for. We look at his actions through civil-rights-colored glasses and criticize him for not heeding the advice of Martin Luther King -- a man born 423 years after Columbus died.

Sure, Chris Columbus probably doesn't deserve a federal holiday; the first day of every new year probably doesn't either. But using 2014 morals to judge a guy for doing his job five centuries ago is like wondering why Isaac Newton wasn't smart enough to just go and look-up gravity on Wikipedia.

NATE STRAUCH IS A COLUMNIST AND REPORTER WITH THE SHERMAN-DENISON (TEXAS) HERALD DEMOCRAT.

Commentary on 10/21/2014

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