Today is Columbus Day, or (among the alternatively oriented) Native Peoples’ Day, both displaced in any case, as even major Catholic feasts now are, to a different date, so that people will have long weekends, or not be inconvenienced, or something.
In any event, it’s a day now redefined in terms that make it unclear what, if anything, we are celebrating, or deploring, in this booming, buzzing confusion that we still (kind of) think of as the twenty-first Christian century. So let us seek a little clarity.
