It seems that when a man goes to the trouble of discovering a whole continent—whether he didn’t or didn’t—he ought to get more than a cold shoulder and a government holiday traded off like a worn-out mule at the fair. But that’s just what’s happening in Nevada, where the legislature, led by a certain Miss Backus—who calls herself an “urban Indian,” though I’ve seen urban pigeons with more sense—is trying to peel Columbus Day off the calendar and patch in something called “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
Let’s be clear–it ain’t a story about kindness, understanding, or even true history. It’s about politics, that gray and slippery substance that oozes through the cracks in our republic and gums up everything that once worked fine.
President Trump, a man who—right or wrong—never met a punch he didn’t return with interest, declared that he was bringing Columbus Day back– not rebranding it, not apologizing for it, but raising it from the ashes like a Roman eagle. And good on him.
You see, the thing about Columbus is that he’s become a scapegoat, the nation’s historical punching bag. Was he perfect? No. He made navigational decisions that would make a cat laugh, but he did something—something great.
He opened the door. And for that, generations of Americans, including millions of proud Italian-Americans, remembered him as a symbol of courage and new beginnings.
Miss Backus and her colleagues in Carson City want to remove the old sailor from his pedestal and replace it with a sentiment known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Never mind that Nevada already has a day for that—August 9, to be precise.
It wasn’t enough. Now, it’s gotta occupy the same Monday as Columbus, like a tenant elbowing out the landlord.
They’ll tell you it’s not about erasure. “We’re not replacing Columbus Day,” they say, with the same tone you hear from a man explaining how he technically didn’t cheat at cards. But if it waddles like a duck and quacks like historical revisionism, I suppose we’re having pork for dinner.
Take Jill Douglass—God bless her gumption. She showed up in person, not hiding behind a phone line, to say, “We should not tear down another important part of our history.”
And she’s right. It isn’t just about Columbus. It’s about whether we still believe in honoring the messy, complicated men and women who made America or whether we sand down the rough edges of our past until it looks like a polished lie.
Meanwhile, the high priests of grievance—folks like Mr. Orosco, speaking in names few Americans could spell, much less pronounce—take to the podium to speak of “cultural genocide” and “Abya Yala,” as though changing the name of a Monday is going to right five centuries of wrongs.
It won’t. But it will divide, and that’s the point.
Let me end with this–history is not a menu. You don’t get to pick only the parts that agree with you and send the rest back to the kitchen. If you start removing every statue, story, and holiday that offends someone, you’ll soon get left with nothing but blank pages and confusion.
For all his brashness, Trump understands something vital–you don’t keep a nation strong by pretending it never stumbled. You keep it strong by remembering who dared to take the first step.
And on that count, Christopher Columbus still has his boots on.
The Old Blog in the Desert 