The real Columbus Day

Ah yes today is the 12th of October, the real Columbus Day. It was celebrated yesterday as an “official federal government holiday” to give certain employees a Monday off to have a three day weekend. Most businesses were open so for the working public and our schools it was business as usual.

As a child in grade school I remember drawing pictures of Christopher Columbus’s three ships the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. It was a fun day to celebrate the arrival of the first Europeans in America. We were all proud to be citizens of the United States of America. Long after in the 1970’s those of more progressive thinking considered the arrival of Europeans a racist disaster so they got it renamed Indigenous People’s Day. Whatever?

I see the change as a chance for malcontents to try to make us feel guilty because our beloved United States was mainly settled by immigrants from Europe who had white skins rather than skin of darker hues. Those European immigrants also brought with them their Christian faith and created a government based on those principles a government formed around a Constitution that granted equal rights to all citizens no matter their skin hues. Yes, my ancestors participated in a Civil War to stamp out slavery in this country and that should have been end of story but still a large number of critical race believers strive mightily to inflate their own status by putting others of different skin hues down. Personally, I’m having none of it. I believe more like the quote attributed to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “Judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.”

I’ve written before of my C-47 pilot training partner Mike that proudly came from Santo Domingo which proclaims to be the spot where Columbus first landed in this hemisphere. Santo Domingo is the capital of the Dominican Republic which shares the Island of Hispaniola with the nation of Haiti. Mike was a pilot in their air force and chose the C-47 rather than the P-51 back home because he wanted to become instrument rated which is evidently seldom required in that area of the Caribbean with its beautiful weather nearly year-round. I could share lots of stories about Mike but never did he show anything but pride for his country being the place where Columbus first arrived and set the stage for the vast immigration of Europeans to America.

Evidently, Southwest airlines pilots are objecting to President Biden’s edict to have all employees inoculated for Covid 19. Southwest is canceling up to a thousand flights a day by personnel calling in sick or taking accumulated days off. Rumor has it that the pilots at United Airlines is also considering the same sick-out to object to the President’s unconstitutional edict.

I say more power to them. It is about time that our essential workers, medical, law enforcement and more make a stand for personal rights. My own feeling is that each person in this free country should be able to make the decision to vaccinate for Covid or not. Then too the edict makes no provision for those who have already had the Covid and have developed immunity that studies show is more effective than any of the shots that are currently approved to prevent the disease. Yes, Grannie Annie and I have both had the Moderna shots, with records to prove it, but we are both in that more mature age that has proven most susceptible to the Wuhan man-made virus. We too get our annual flu shots and have for years but that too is a personal decision for each of us. There is enough information out there that every individual should be able to do what they feel is best for their own body and that of their minor-aged children. We live in a free country and don’t need some progressive in government to punish us for not obeying his/her unconstitutional edicts.

I see that my grandkids that moved back home and attend California public schools will all have to get “the shot” and wear masks in their schools. It is their choice but at least they can remember back attending school here where the mask requirement was eventually lifted.

Sometimes California does something right. The next time that California has an election they can vote on a law that will require education money to follow the student when moving to another school, religious, charter, or private. If that law passes in California I would predict that the same will happen in a lot of other states hopefully in Nebraska also. I recently visited with one of our local school board members about just that very thing and his object was that they needed those funds to keep their public schools open. Maybe if we had that law here, that the funds follow the student, they wouldn’t be tempted to teach CRT or the sex education curriculum currently being pushed by the Nebraska Education Association. Just thinking.

That is how I saw it.

Dick Trail