a different story for this day

"COLUMBUS" DAY

by Daniel Borgstrom

On this day, wrongly named in honor of a guy who deserves no such honor, I think of a day when I was a little kid and came home from school and told my father of what I'd leaned in school that day. It was about the man who'd supposedly discovered America.

My father heard me out, then, in his somewhat broken English, he told me that that man was not first European to reach America. He told me about the voyages of Scandinavians who sailed the seas in open boats and arrived in North America around year 1000.

After telling me this, he admonished me not say that to anyone, to simply go along with the official story, because to say anything else might put me in bad with the powers that be. Of course my father didn't call them "the powers that be", but that was what he meant.

Daniel Borgstrom
October 2012



http://danielborgstrom.blogspot.com/