Happy Columbus Day

How should we celebrate Columbus Day? As a celebration of western European values and expansion?
Or as a shameful conquest of noble savages that lived in harmony with nature?

Edward Hudgins celebrates the ordinary people that came out from Europe to America.
It may have been that the stout Cortez and his ilk enslaved the Meso and South Americans. But
in North America, the conquerors were workers who came to carve a new life out of the wilderness.

They had to clear the land, plant and sow crops. They had to practice
the trades of carpenters, masons, loggers, miners, blacksmiths and tailors to build
their towns and to create the necessities for life and prosperity. In the centuries that
followed, their descendants -- including Americans today -- built the richest, most prosperous
country on Earth.

Instapundit, on the other hand celebrates the change that Columbus’s discoveries
had on the Europeans back in Europe. Quoting Samual Eliot Morison:

"A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after
the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating
as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future."

In all this celebration though, we should remember those swept away in the triumphant European
expansion as its adventurers spread out across the oceans
and the continents of the world, trading, dominating, killing,
and ruling. The victims. It ain’t fun when your world gets turned upside down by strangers that
suddenly appear over the horizon.

We like to present history as a triumphant narrative of progress from darkness to light, from
simplicity to sophistication, from cruelty to compassion. Others like to present it as a
death spiral of evil and despair.

But the big question is: What does it all mean?