www.foolonahill.com
Who cares? Yet we are taught in school, as is each successive generation how Columbus found America. Incidentally I would like to point out to the intelligent reader - America was never lost.
Columbus (or Amerigo Vespucci, as you may like it), they say, discovered America. I do not argue with this saying that it always existed. That would be as ludicrous as saying that Einstein didn’t formulate the general theory of relativity, as it always existed. My bone of contention however is that Columbus(or Vespucci) wasn’t even the first man to set foot on what has become the ‘Promised Land’ of today. The Apache, Navajo, Kaiwa, Siux, Blackfeet, Cherokee, Comanche et al already inhabited it. America is named after Amerigo Vespucci. Happily forgotten is that the original inhabitants of the land, the so-called ‘Red Indians’, already had a name for their dwellings. They called it ‘home’. To bring this point closer to home, imagine being taught that Vasco Da Gama discovered India, or Marco Polo discovered China.
You may decide to disregard such a situation as highly hypothetical.
Not so if you turn your eyes to the recent deletions from the history textbooks
in our country without the requisite permission of the authors, in utter
disregard of the fundamental rights of freedom of speech and expression.
When the political party in power has a particular bent of mind, we can
expect our younger generation to be fed any ridiculous propaganda that
may so please them. Gone are the days when the written word and the text
we study in school was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth. Today it is not even the law of the land.
www.foolonahill.com