In 1492, seventy-five million people lived in the Americas and 60 million lived in Europe. Between 1500 and 1800, as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease. Europeans brought with them a host of diseases for which Americans - who had crossed the Bering Strait 14,000 years earlier - had no immunity. It's true that the Europeans practiced genocide. It's also true that genocide was nearly incidental in its death toll in comparison to deaths by a dozen pandemics. The first Americans and American civilizations were devastated.
Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492 but died thinking he had landed in Asia. It took time for Europeans to realize that they’d discovered a new world and it called everything into question. The Bible made no mention of Americans and yet here were strange tales of a people who had seemed to evolve a very similar civilization -complete with aristocracy and priests - but who knew nothing of Abraham, Jesus or Muhammed.
This collision was devastating to Americans and disruptive to Europeans. A quarter of a century after Columbus landed in the Americas, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses, igniting a Protestant Revolution that would transform Europe. The contrast between how northern and southern Europe would disperse power between church and state was trivial in comparison to how Americans and Europeans ordered their worlds. Big change is easier to undertake when it is made to seem small by contact with a new civilization. Soon gold and silver began streaming in from the Americas, triggering a long economic transformation that is still incomplete.
The White House came out swinging in defense of Columbus Day as a great day that deserves celebration. Other people find it horrific that we celebrate the start of the end of the Americas of 1491 and the people who lived here. In 100 years, when coastal cities are being rebuilt at great expense, people will dismiss everything we have done and stood for simply because none of us are innocent of the consumption of fossil fuels. They’ll likely be horrified at us in the same way that we are horrified by the brutality of Europeans who first came to the Americas. I don’t know how you glorify Columbus or ignore this as a momentous day. I don't know how you properly judge two groups of people who were very different beings from us, shaped by such radically different worldviews, beliefs, practices and technology. I don’t know if you celebrate this day or condemn it or what difference either makes. I only know that to experience anything as disruptive, dangerous, exhilarating, terrifying, transformative and as difficult to comprehend as it was for Americans and Europeans when they first encountered each other, we will have to encounter a civilization from another solar system.
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