Columbus Day

I liked Ed Hudgins' Columbus Day piece. Columbus' arrival in this hemisphere has become a contentious topic, with lots of arguing over the sometimes-ugly details of how the European settlement of the Americas played out.

Hudgins takes the interesting tack of trying to boil it down to essentials by focusing on daily life in pre-Columbian America, and what it was like to live that way. He then asks:

"But what of young Indian children who wondered why family members sickened and died and if there were ways unknown to the shamans to relieve their pain or cure them; if there were ways to build shelters that would resist bitter winters, stifling summers and the storms that raged in both seasons; whether there were ways to guarantee food would always be abundant and starvation no longer a drought away; why plants grow and what those lights in the sky really were; and whether they could ever actually fly like birds and observe mountains from the height of eagles? Where were the opportunities for these natives?"

Sometimes I just feel sad that it took so long to get where we are, that so many children for so many millennia stared at the stars in wonder with no way to find the truth.

Ah, my little ones,
The lights in the sky are suns.