And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that today (October 9) is listed as Columbus Day on calendars, but news stories today and this weekend describe cities which are changing that name to Indigenous Peoples Day. Government unions got the original October 12 date changed so they could get another long weekend.

The thought being that Christopher Columbus and his crews in 1492 arrived from Spain and interrupted the peacefully existing native population. That period of American history is variously represented.

In today’s Peanuts cartoon strip, Sally Brown is preparing an essay for school, and she describes how the queen said she could only afford three ships for Columbus Day’s trip. Under the impression Day was his last name.

There have been movements to change the name to Native American Day, but indigenous is more accurate than native, with the former accurately describing the peoples here when Columbus arrived. The fact is, there is a majority of opinion that they were no more native than the Spanish, they just arrived earlier over the land bridge which then existed between Russia, the Aleutian Islands, and present day Alaska.

While it is true that Columbus wasn’t the first to “discover” present day North America and he did not know where he had landed, it did mark the first introduction to the new world for Europeans, so was significant.

And history also shows the indigenous folks were not all that peace loving, and were savage toward each other in many cases, before and after Chris.

I suspect the move to get rid of Columbus and his effort is just a part of the larger effort to wipe away all formerly honored aspects of American life as taught to, and learned by, school children until the world became “politically correct” to a fault.

Speaking of seafarers, when I heard that the USS Kearsarge was dispatched to help with relief efforts in the Caribbean, I perked up. That was the name of the aircraft carrier, CVA-33, on which my air group was deployed.

I thought the carrier had been mothballed shortly after that, so when I heard the name again in the late 1990s, I was surprised. Retired career Navy officer Maury Gallagher assured me it was not the same ship, but rather a new amphibious assault ship (LHD-3). It carries helicopters and VTOL (vertical take off and landing) aircraft, and can flood an aft area and launch landing craft.

Aerial photos of the new ship show it looks a great deal like CVA-33 before it was converted to an angled deck to accommodate jets after the Korean war.

The current ship is the fifth with that name, named after Mount Kearsarge, which I think is in New England someplace. The first was a “sloop” used during the civil war. Next was a battleship (BB) and was active during World War I. Next was an Essex-class CVA, renamed Hornet (CVA-12) active in WWII.

Then “my” carrier. My cruise ship!