Columbus Day…keep the whole picture in focus

When I saw comedian Dick Gregory a few years ago, he asked someone in the audience if he could borrow their car keys for a moment. They gave him their keys, and he said, “Cool! Now I get to keep your car!” The person said, “Wait, that’s my car! You can’t steal it!” and Dick shot back, “Hey, I’m not stealing it, I discovered it!”

As a moment of filling in the blanks of our history, take a moment if you can on this Columbus Day to look over what the original founding father’s profile really contained (here’s a place to start, in this essay by noted historian Howard Zinn.)

The essay ends with this hope:

“In rethinking our history, we are not just looking at the past, but at the present, and trying to look at it from a point of view of those who have been left out of the benefits of so-called civilizations. It is a simple but profoundly important thing we are trying to accomplish, to look at the world from other points of view. We need to do that, as we come into the next century, if we want this coming century to be different, if we want it to be, not an American century, or a Western century, or a white century, or a male century, or any nation’s, any group’s century, but a century for the human race.”

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