Columbus: A Day And A Statue
Were you looking forward to a three-day holiday, this weekend? An extended stay from whatever drudgery you find yourself cased into on a weekly basis? This week more than ever? Well, you may be happy to know (or not) that Monday is Columbus Day. A day named after history’s best-known pillager and flat Earth debunker Christopher Columbus.
Well, unless you work at the post-office, a federal bank, or live in that other school district, you will probably need to wake 20 minutes earlier on Monday morning. Why 20 minutes earlier, you ask? So you can surprise your enemies with an early attack, much like Native Americans use to. Your enemies, this day, being the city bus driver operating on the transit’s holiday schedule, and your boss who is most likely, out shopping for a new bed.
It could be worse, police officers in New York and Chicago are tasked with having to guard statues of Columbus, from idiots wanting to deface and beat them up. It’s true, according to the Chicago Tribune a young man wandering the Near West Side in the wee hours of Saturday, stumbled upon a bronze effigy of the Italian navigator and began to, well, deface it.
WGN9 followed up on the story and learned that the young man was accompanied by two others. The men who were riding bikes “discovered” the statue in Arrigo Park, which is located in the University Village neighborhood of Chicago. Instead of planting flags, they scratched and spray-painted their politics along the plaque, and parts of the statue which bears a faint resemblance to lesser-known navigator Leif Erikson.
” Early Saturday, someone spotted three men defacing the statue. Two of the men got away on bikes, but a third fell off his and was detained by a witness,” said a police spokesman.
Down south, another statue was the setting of contention once again, as Richard B Spencer and members of his white supremacist ilk gathered for a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The statue, under shroud as it awaits removal by the local government, was one of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
On the topic of statue removal; the American Indian Community House penned a letter to New York’s Mayor de Blasio monuments commission, urging the removal of all the city’s Christopher Columbus Statues. New York City will host the largest parade in the nation in honor of Columbus Day, in which the Mayor frequently takes part. Now there is something you can do on Monday if you are in the neighborhood. Parades are meant to be fun, and they can be and will be as we move forward from the events of last week. Americans will unite again in strength, peace, and prosperity, so let’s get to work. Unless of course, you have the day off.
[Featured image by Spencer Platt/ Getty Images]
