My worst subject in high school and college was history. Perhaps it was the way it was taught … lots of dates and details that just seemed to be disjointed in my mind. Well, there was one that I did and still do remember … 1492 … the date given to Columbus discovering America, even though he really didn’t do that.
It was years later that I was informed that he was probably not the first to discover America. He was just the first to get credit for discovering it. Then, I was to learn that what he did was not so honorable to keep him in the book of great sailors like Magellan and others.
Now, the balance of the story has shifted so significantly that there is a serious movement to remove him from the history books with any degree of greatness. In fact, the mood right now is to condemn him for all the wrongs done, even though they were not wrong in that day and time.
It took a long time for the Catholic Church to apologize about how they treated Galileo. It took a long time for us to abolish slavery, or at least make it unlawful. What we seem to fail to do is to learn from history, so we are doomed to repeat it.
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!