It was nice having today off. Just having an opportunity to sleep in was nice. I got the day off because of Columbus Day. It was initially meant to be a celebration of the man who found the Americas. Over time, it has become a bit of a controversy. In fact, Brown University is now referring to it has the Autumn Holiday Weekend.

For those of you unfamiliar with the debate over Christopher Columbus, I figured I would share some of the things I have been thinking about today after reading about it in today's paper. Columbus is a bit of an Italian hero. He may have sailed for Spain, he was actually born in Italy and hired by Queen Isabella and her husband King Ferdinand to seek out a way to China. Low and behold, he ran into the island of Hispanola. Some say this was important because it proved the world was in fact round and it was the start of the opening up of North and South America to Europe.

There is little debate about the fact that he was not the first to get to the Americas. There were already well-established Native American cultures thriving here.

Proof has also been in evidence for decades that the Norsemen of Scandinavia also found their way to Newfoundland in Canada many years previous to Columbus bumping into the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. Is it right to overlook their attempts at settlement there.

Of course, there are the horrors of mass illness that decimated the native populations of the Americas as they came into contact with Europeans and diseases they had no resistance to. There is also the fact that Columbus and many Europeans after them saw an opportunity in enslaving the native peoples.

With all that said, I think that Columbus was a man of his time period. He was as ignorant about illness and the evils of slavery that many cultures of the time period supported. That does not excuse him for the bad things that he did, but I think that it is important not give him responsibility for having greater influence than he really had.

Most of the intelligent people of his time already new the world was round. And while the Americas had already been visited by Europeans, few new the details of it. He really didn't discover the Americas, but he did open them up for contact with the rest of the world. Of course, those who followed him are just as liable for the horrors that hit the native populations as the continents were exploited for European purposes. He was basically a man for hire.

So what does all this thinking leave me with ... Well, Columbus was a human. He took a job for the money, and he definitely was not the best of commanders. His crews rebelled for good reason. He mistreated them. When he arrived, he looked for opportunities to best take advantage of the place he found. That is not really any different than Cabot, Cook, Magellan and the many, many other explorers that we learned about because the traveled the world and found places that Europeans did not know about.

So why do we celebrate him and should we continue to do so? Well, I think he sort of became a symbol for the Age of Exploration. His mission was the first of a series of successful journeys that opened up trade routes to and around Africa, to China and Japan, to and around the Americas, and even all the way around the world.

Holidays are about symbolism and symbols often focus on the good things they are tied to rather than on the negative side effects. Of course, this has some major ones. Killing thousands of people and forever changing their cultures should never be viewed as a "side effect."

I guess I really don't have the answers to whether we should continue to celebrate this day. Perhaps we could shift it to celebrate native peoples. Maybe we could look to celebrate the idea of seeing new frontiers and looking for them.

No matter what, I think that the debate we are now having is healthy. There are consequences for our actions. We have an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and advancements are always filled with them.