klumbus day

Tomorrow is Klumbus Day, which is not much celebrated or condemned any more. Few workers (about one in 10) will get the day off, and those who do probably won't think much about the accomplishments and crimes of Cristobal Colón, or Klumbus as we call him.

But think about it; the results of Klumbus's voyages were profound. He was sailing west to try to reach the east, a revolutionary move in itself, when he accidentally bumped into an island he didn't know about. And that little island was just a minor prelude to unknown continents, a whole world he had no clue about, and never did figure it out.

Though curious about such things, he was more interested in his own fame and fortune. And Klumbus was a seriously socially backward and perverted criminal, killing and torturing people to try to get the gold they didn't have.

But his act of blind discovery changed everything. After Klumbus, Europeans first invaded, then occupied, then made a home of North and South America, displacing or intermingling with the earlier inhabitants, creating new bloodlines in the process. For better or for worse, nothing would ever be the same again.

Leif Ericson the Viking was in Canada centuries before Klumbus bumped into that little island in the Caribbean, but his discoveries led to no permanent occupation of the new lands. And it was Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian adventurer, who figured out just what it was that Klumbus had stumbled across. But neither of them can match the significance of Mr. Klumbus and his remarkable transformative boat trip of 1492.