Monday, October 12, 2015

Columbus Day, Indigenous Americans Day - what about Exploration Day?

Maybe today should be Exploration Day: a day when we can celebrate the courage (if not always the motives) of all explorers of the Americas: the early Asians who pushed across the land bridge, the voyagers who (apparently) spread their culture down the West Coast with amazing speed, the bold Vikings, the later Europeans with the vision and nerve to pilot tiny ships across the Atlantic, the Polynesians who dared the emptiness of the Pacific to reach Hawaii, and the explorers who went out from the Americas: into the north and south polar regions, into orbit, and to the Moon, and all the great scientific explorers who continue to probe the seas. It would be a day to learn, understand, and debate the impact of those explorations: no white-washing, but no blaming without trying to understand, either. It could conclude with a night spent gathering at telescopes looking up at the universe and asking, "What next?"

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