Searching for Excitement. Columbus Day, 2011.

Excitement and Columbus Day? Protests and arrests have been the only excitement associated with this legal holiday of late, and those come on the Saturday beforehand because nobody outside of the federal government gets this day off. Virtually no private employers, and increasingly fewer state and local governments, recognize it. Political correctness and economic reality combined to sink Columbus’s day, with economics being the rockier reef.

In an economy that’s a ship dead in the water, traditional ethnic pride isn’t worth the cost of a paid holiday for our workers, government or private. I get ethnic pride; my grandfather, Antonio Evangelista born in Italy, is only one of my three foreign-born grandparents. I get tradition. I am a Texas Aggie, a graduate of a university where tradition has been known to trump common sense. Tradition is also the foundation of our federal legal holidays and this blog’s posts on them.

The Presidential Proclamation for this year’s legal holiday uses the voyage of 1492 as metaphor for our national character:

The excitement Christopher Columbus and his crewmembers experienced that October morning is felt every day by today's pioneers: entrepreneurs and inventors, researchers and engineers. On the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage, we celebrate the pursuit of discovery as an essential element of the American character. Embracing this heritage and inspiring young people to set their own sails, our Nation will reach the shores of an ever brighter tomorrow.

The most important discovery that will make our tomorrow brighter isn’t going to occur in some laboratory or R&D unit. It has to occur in Congress and statehouses across the county when our elected representatives, like Columbus’ crew, discover that the ship doesn’t move forward without cooperation. We don’t get far when the right side and the left side of the boat are more concerned about beating each other than in what lies ahead. But enough about that, how about this legal holiday?


In Colorado, Columbus Day has a place of honor in the list of legal holidays because while the New World was “discovered” 1900 miles to our southeast, the legal holiday commemorating it happened here. Colorado was the first state to make Columbus Day a legal holiday in 1907; the feds didn’t follow suit until 1971.

As business is this blog’s focus, we should recall that Columbus’s voyage was actually a business venture that took advantage of increasing competition and imperialistic attitudes among European nations. If this Italian had not opened the door to Europe’s colonization of the Americas, it is inevitable that another European would have. Exploitation, slavery and disease would have followed just the same. We can’t change how cultures collided 500 years ago, but we don’t have to accept continuing collisions.

Jasmine Pickner, world champion hoop dancer from the Crow Creek Sioux, celebrating another legal holiday: Independence Day

Americans of Italian descent (my family and me included) should be able to celebrate their rich heritage. We can and should be able to celebrate Native American cultures as well. St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, and Juneteenth are all popular celebrations outside of the focal ethnic groups. These days are occasions to celebrate our varied backgrounds. They happen, quite naturally, without need for a legal holiday and without reason for protest.

If we can afford a mid-October legal holiday, then perhaps it should be re-conceived as a celebration that honors the peoples, not the conquest, of the Americas. An Americas day, plural not possessive, can honor the original peoples of the hemisphere as it reminds us, its current peoples, that we share more than a land mass, we share a future. That future will be exciting, too, once we get back to the business of exploring, of looking forward and fixing problems, not fighting over responsibility for past troubles.