It’s Columbus Day: a holiday slapped together to celebrate a raping, murdering, plunder-horny opportunist that’s been dead for hundreds of years. Columbus, Ohio? It was named after the gold loving bastard. Despite this, for the first time since the city’s founding in 1812, Columbus Day won’t be celebrated there. Instead, the city’s government has opted to throw the days off that are typically allotted to the holiday at something far more important: honoring the United States’ veterans.
From AP News:
Ohio’s capital city, population 860,000, will be open for business Monday after observing Columbus Day probably “for as long as it had been in existence,” said Robin Davis, a spokeswoman for Democratic Mayor Andrew Ginther. City offices will close instead on Veterans Day, which falls on Nov. 12 this year.
“We have a number of veterans who work for the city, and there are so many here in Columbus,” Davis said. “We thought it was important to honor them with that day off.” And, she said, the city doesn’t have the budget to give its 8,500 employees both days off, she said.
The way that city of Columbus gave the shaft to Columbus Day is absolutely genius. According to the AP, instead of having a public vote over whether or not the city should abolish the observation of the holiday–something that has, in other locales, drawn protests, and a whack of political moaning–they opted to announce, late last week, that they were shifting the city’s stock of holiday hours from the contentious holiday to be used on Veteran’s Day in November. No fuss, no muss.
Despite Davis’ insistence that the city’s kicking Columbus to the curb wasn’t done in reaction to the growing public opposition to the explorer’s legacy of slaughtering and enslaving North America’s indigenous peoples in the name of profit, we’ll take any diminishing of a shitheel’s glory that we can get.
Image by Sebastiano del Piombo – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons by as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, Public Domain, Link