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Monday 10 October 2011

Happy Columbus Day

Happy Columbus Day 
Happy Columbus Day 
Happy Columbus Day 

The usual rumblings to participate when we remember the most famous in the history of America, an illegal immigrant, undocumented Wanderer from Spain, which brought the plagues of fire and sword from the old to the new world.


Columbus Day is the celebration of our party the most confused, the one where the public's understanding of the day has moved further from the intention of those who initiated compliance. Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New world, October 12, 1492 did not become a federal holiday in the United States in 1934 when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1971, we celebrated on about today's date Monday, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and July 4 race escaped the ax, and is still celebrated on their actual date.

There is a tradition to celebrate the European discovery of America outside the United States. Many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean began to celebrate the day as a celebration of ethnic Latin long before Columbus Day was on your holiday calendar in the United States, Venezuela, is now celebrating a Day of Indigenous Resistance. In Spain, the day when an Italian has discovered what we now know that the Bahamas under the impression that he would be Japan has long been celebrated as Dia de la Hispanidad.

American history, to fight the Columbus Day celebration was really nothing to do with the actual arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Western Hemisphere. It was not about to celebrate the conquest of America, native tribes, or extirpation.

The day was made a holiday after years of lobbying as a way to recognize the contributions of Roman Catholics and immigrants in general in American life. It is a holiday that celebrates diversity, not to celebrate the imperial influence of Ferdinand and Isabella, a couple who were deeply unhappy oath Breakers notorious Inquisition and anti-Semitic.

Posthumous portrait of Columbus from Lead (Wikimedia)

In 1930 he was a broad sense as well as Protestant and Catholic Americans that the Roman Catholics, especially Catholics and non-English speaking countries, was not and could not be "real Americans. Al Smith, the popular governor of New York was the first Catholic ever nominated for president of the country with the major parties, the suspicion of his religion has experienced an even greater loss than usual, since many of the solidly Democratic, and Prohibition, the voters of the South left the Catholic Church "wet" vote Reliable Dry Protestant, Herbert Hoover.

For the Ku Klux Klan in those days, Catholics were a foreign influences "real" Americans had to fight, and many white Protestants still regarded as the Italians, Greeks and other ethnic groups in Southern Europe being too "dark "To be completely white.

Irish Catholics were discriminated against, but most of them arrive in the United States who have English as their mother tongue (some still spoke Gaelic as their first language in the 19th century) and looks like "white" as any the world, the Irish through hard work and the weight of numbers had been cut in a solid enough for himself in 1930. The Irish arrive at the height of American society was marked by the appointment of Joseph Kennedy FDR as ambassador to the Court of St. James, many Hibernian soul was comforted and reassured to think of a Kennedy associate with Irish kings Premiers and more equal as a representative of the President of the United States.

The Americans were in the Italian largest and most powerful ethnic group of Catholics who still felt uncomfortable to be outside the American mainstream. They were (and are) the undecided voters, especially in the home state of New York FDR Italian-Americans (some of the old rivalry with the Irish) is often Republicans.

Knights of Columbus was founded in 1882 in New Haven, Connecticut, a Catholic fraternal organization. Catholics were forbidden by Rome to join the Masons and other fraternal groups at the time the Catholics in the United States excluded from membership. These groups of bourgeois self fraternal, community service, raised funds for members in need, and often organized insurance cheap life for their members. Isolation of Catholics of this vital element of American life both emphasized their outsider status in the United states  leaving them without resources and support of these groups are often available.

Knights of Columbus met a need and quickly became a national organization. Membership in the organization was a way for Catholics to help themselves and their communities to assert their identity as Catholics, and also to move into the culture of civic activism and voluntary that are the hallmark of the traditional Anglo-Protestant social organization in Britain and America.

Christopher Columbus was a useful name for the founders of the appropriate organization. He was a Catholic himself, and an agent of their most Catholic Ferdinand and Isabella, majesties. Known to all school children as the discoverer of America, he stressed the vital role that Catholics played in the history of the New World from the time of discovery forward. The Irish then dominated American Catholic life, but there were tensions between groups and Irish immigrants who struggle for representation and recognition. Selecting the name of an Italian employed by the Spanish authorities have given the Knights of Columbus a little universal and Catholic character "c", rather than purely Hibernian.

The order has been controversial, in 1912, argues that the fourth degree knights had sworn to destroy the Freemasons and the Protestants became more common, and the taxes figured in the campaign 1928, Al Smith. When Episcopalian Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932, lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and Italian-American organizations and interest groups to make Columbus Day a national holiday has grown hard, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a law to make holiday October 12, 1934.

Columbus Day is not an imperial feast. It is a celebration of American diversity, a belated recognition of the importance of Catholics and immigrants in American life. It's a celebration, we share with our neighbors in Spanish in the New World one day and it demonstrates our growing understanding that the religious and ethnic pluralism is not a problem for our American heritage, pluralism is heart of our identity as people.

American Indian activists who want to use the day to make a point is fine with me, they do have a point. But Columbus Day is a festival that was created to celebrate the dignity and equality of all Americans, whatever their origin or religion, that I think is a good reason for the country to take a day off.






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