Skip to main content

Why Can't Columbus Day Just Be A Food Holiday?

Today is Columbus Day. I never gave the day much thought really, except it's a Federal Holiday and in the past few years it's been a paid holiday I get to take. A few years ago a friend of mine posted to Facebook about Christopher Columbus, in doing so she enlightened me about what a shit the guy was.

I was in my forties by the time I figured out what a giant douchebag Christopher Columbus was. Seems like a lot of people are just figuring it out because now, all of a sudden, people are defacing statues of him. There's a lot of questioning of patriarchy in 2017. To me, I have to say, Columbus symbolized America, the inception of this place I call home, more than he symbolized patriarchy. And, let's admit that pretty much every European explorer in the 1700s was a prostitute of patriarchal colonialism. So why can't we be realists about the past? Why can't we just celebrate America and how Italians have made America great? With food?

My mother was Italian American. Her parents had emigrated with her family en mass and she was born here in the US, in West Virginia. Italian was her first language.  The entire family was poor. They labored in coal mines. They were openly discriminated against by other "white" people all around them. I know this because my mother told me about it.

In the US my mom had the opportunity to succeed in a way that she would never have been able to in Italy. She was the first college educated person in her family, including men. She went on to get a dual masters degree. She worked hard, had a good career and a nice home. When I came along in the 70s I didn't even know what discrimination was. I had to learn what it was. Both my parents said it was a very bad thing, because first it's OK to discriminate against one type of person, and the next thing it's OK to discriminate against you because you're Italian. I still hold this lesson in my heart. Italian Americans have some terrible stereotypes. While I enjoyed The Sopranos immensely I want to be associated with that stereotype as much as my African American friends want to be associated with The Wire.

Some people have called for a renaming of Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day. Sigh. Great. Everyone else gets their own day except us. If every Irishy person in the world can get religiously drunk on March 17th, then why is it so hard to celebrate Columbus day with Chianti and some pizza? I think most Italian Americans want people to see the positive. We can all complain about how much of a shit Chris Columbus was while appreciating the food, the fashion and culture of Italy, which has contributed a lot to the United States. And for the record, we should have an all new holiday for indigenous people. They deserve more than a recycled day.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Human / Nature

About twelve years ago I didn’t really understand Climate Change but I was actually looking forward to it, sort-of like a good mystery I could become enthralled with.  At the time all I knew was I wanted a different lifestyle, and I thought, maybe Climate Change might make that happen? Maybe my life will actually be better because of it?  I had this fantasy about being a self sufficient bohemian gourmet, growing my own food harvested right in my yard. Mother Earth magazine seemed so bucolic. I wanted the opposite of my cramped apartment in San Francisco. In 2008 Climate Change was just an excuse to make changes, quit a job and move.   I moved East, close to my dad. I didn’t mention anything about Climate Change to my father, a total denier who was a meteorologist when he was in his 20s. There was no amount of practical data that would change his mind. He retired in ’93, with nothing to be stressed about so he simply didn’t care about anything but football, fishing and food.  

The Unsatisfying Story of Vegan Penn Jillette

Every so often my husband will mention how he’s interested in becoming vegetarian. Yesterday he was telling me about Penn Jillette, the famous comedian from Penn & Teller. He had read how Jillette is now a vegan, saying with personal interest that Jillette said “he feels so much better now.” First I was perplexed, we are both Penn & Teller fans and as performers over the years Penn Jillette struck me as an unapologetic manly man, veganism seems totally at odds with his character. I also barked at my burger loving husband, “What would you eat if you became a vegan? What do you even like that’s vegetarian?” There was no reply because my husband leaves all the food decisions up to me and I am nowhere close to being a vegetarian myself.  I wanted to know more about this so I go online and Google ‘Penn Jillette Vegan’ and found this LA Times article ;  “At 6 feet, 6 inches and 330 pounds, he was hospitalized for his high blood pressure and a 90% heart blockage. Already taki

UX Design Process aka Web Product Design Process

So... I'm on Pinterest updating a 'board' for my portfolio and I discover that other people have pinned my Experience Design Process graphic from my website. Apparently this graphic comes right up in Google Searches if you search on on Experience Design Process. Since the image on my site is small I'm re-posting the graphic here! Can anybody guess what this image was originally create for? I don't know what I was thinking about these colors! So what is going on here? In the middle of the graphic is a series of linear main steps to take in order to design an interactive digital product. The process starts with identifying a project's goals and ends with meeting those goals. In order to meet those goals you need to do some careful work... Surrounding the steps are a set of tasks (or methodologies) to perform in order to complete each step of the process. Over-arching the entire process are guidelines like "vetting" and "informed iteratio