It's Been a Few Days

Spent the weekend at a convention, geeking out. I won't go into the details, because they're both shamelessly nerdy and also obscure enough that nobody would really understand. I like to think that this is one of my saving graces, this ability to (hopefully) recognize that not everybody is necessarily interested in the same things as I am. Which is why you likely won't see me expound endlessly on our criminal under-appreciation of the humble d12 or whatever.

Jesus Christ, what did I do today?

It's a day off, you know? One of the lovely benefits of working for the government (well, the county) is that we get to take all kinds of holidays that nobody else even remembers or cares about. I mean, today's Columbus Day, which I'm pretty sure nobody cares about these days unless you're in a school district that gets Columbus Day off (we did back in New York, I think) or you work for any level of government. It's just one of those cultural artifacts that's hung on long after the fact; after all, I think it's been determined that the Norse (vikings, if you prefer) actually beat Columbus to the New World by a few hundred years, and that whole "the world is round thing" was already established by the time Alexander the Great was conquering the known world. Why don't we celebrate Amerigo Vespucci Day? I mean, half the world is named after him! Interesting side note; has anybody ever wondered why he named those continents after his first name and not his last? Who does that?

Now, I'm not saying that I think days that celebrate people are wrong. I just think that it's time to own up to the fact that we're not really celebrating or saying a whole lot by picking Columbus Day as the day to acknowledge the deeds of the past. While I can certainly appreciate the epic voyage of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria (I can't believe I still remember that, and to our Spanish speaking readers, I'd have included the little ~ above the n if I'd known how), I think that it sticks out as somewhat shortsighted and lazy to celebrate Columbus and not ol' Amerigo, or Leif Erickson, or whoever.

Maybe I'm just prejudiced, or it could be that, out of all of the people in history that I regard highly, the explorers aren't the ones I'm eager to give days of remembrance, because the virtue of the achievement to an explorer is that they happened to be the first person who made it there and back to tell the story. If it hadn't been Columbus (and as we've learned, it really wasn't) somebody else would have made the voyage. Compare that to the likes of Socrates or Newton, whose thinking marked them as true visionaries and whose contributes changed our world. Or compare it to Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Ghandi and the social progress their actions wrought. Granted, MLK does have his own day and I'm grateful that he does, because he deserves it.

It just feels a little strange, and somehow devalues the prestige of having your own Day, if we allow artifacts like Columbus Day to persist simply because that's what we've always done.

However, I am still grateful that I didn't have to go to work today. So, that's something.