Once again it is Monday and here I am with my Views From the 14th Floor. Yes, boys and girls this is the blog that dares to ask the hard questions. "When have your t-shirts' underarms gotten so yellowed from sweat stains that you should throw them out? How many holes are allowable in your underwear and how large can they be before you throw them out? How long can a person reasonably wear a pair of gym shoes at a public gym before it is no longer socially acceptable?" Now, my readership is divided into two camps, male and female. I would be willing to wager that the female component is at this point thinking, "EWWWW!" Meanwhile, most of the males are thinking, "Good question. I've often pondered these issues as well." And no doubt they have. Trouble is I sometimes pose these great questions but have no real answers. If you have any, there is space at the end of each of these posts for commentary. Feel free. I may very well need to make a trip to Macy's to replace various undergarments, and possibly my running shoes. However, I have larger fish to fry today.
Chris Columbus was a very bad tourist, more like a forewarning of things to come, the Conquistadors. (And no Conquistadors is not the name of a punk band, although it might make a good name for one.) The funny thing is, when I was a child (Some, my wife for instance, might say that I have yet to emerge from childhood, but that's another issue.) I was taught that Christopher Columbus was a visionary, out there to prove that the world was round when ignorance of that fact abounded. He was a man with a vision and a quest to be quested.
Well, as it happens Chris Columbus, who sailed on Spanish ships for the Spanish crown, was an Italian, and he had a vision alright. He had a vision of great wealth. Trouble was, no one in Italy would invest in his vision, nor would anyone in France or Portugal or anywhere else but Spain. I don't know if Isabella thought he was cute or what, but she got talked into giving him a little cash and three ships. She talked Ferdinand into going along.
Off went Chris Columbus and crew in the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, thinking they would reach Asia in a month or two. Boy was he lost. People used to think that he landed on the island of San Salvador. Current thinking is that he landed somewhere in the Bahamas. Apparently he couldn't afford a condo, so he took a bunch of natives prisoner and went back to Spain.
What we now know is that Chris, not only didn't discover America, but a bunch of islands off the coast, and the natives there seem to think that they discovered them first, but we also know that Vikings, not Minnesota Vikings, but Viking Vikings from Scandinavia (Now we know them as Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes.) landed in North America (Canada really) several hundred years before Chris Columbus even thought of sailing westward to reach the East. Trouble was the Vikings, being practical people decided that fighting with the natives all the time wasn't worth the effort, especially if you had to live in Canada. Had the Vikings discovered Martinique, say, they might have stayed.
At any rate, the important thing about Chris Columbus is that his arrival began the coming of the Europeans to America in droves, and not going away. They took over. It should be noted here that in some states with large Native American populations, they celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day and not Columbus Day. Columbus brought the priests and the soldiers, and America was never the same afterwards. "There goes the neighborhood," so to speak.
The thing is, the Europeans believed themselves to be superior. They were Christians and they believed that it was their duty to Christianize people with other religions. Some didn't really want to be Christianized. They died. They had superior technology. The Scientific Revolution had come to Europe. They thought it was their duty to civilize less advanced cultures. Some didn't really want to be civilized. They died. And then they had lots of diseases that indigenous peoples had never been exposed to. Nobody wanted those, and guess what? Millions of them died.
The Republican across the hall at work likes to remind me that it was not just the force of superior arms (Guns and cannons and stuff) that gave America to the Europeans. It was the fact that European nations had full-time armies. Most nations in those days had only citizen armies to protect themselves. The Native Americans often had to leave their farms and their villages and go to fight, leaving the villages to take care of themselves, or not. The Europeans had full-time farmers and businessmen and people back home taking care of the economy while full-time soldiers did their full-time jobs, conquering and killing people.
I got to thinking about this aspect, as described by the Republican across the hall, today. And it occurred to me that during the George W. Bush years, this nation was committed to one war in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. Both required thousands upon thousands of soldiers. The manpower needs of the war went beyond what was available in the full-time professional army that the U.S. had. More men were needed. In previous generations a draft would have been instated. Yet the lesson of the draft during the Vietnam War gave the nation's leadership pause and they opted to call up regiment after regiment of guess what? Citizen soldiers who had to leave their jobs and their families and their villages to go off and fight so there would be no draft to protest, as in Vietnam.
If one follows the logic of the Republican across the hall, we have made our nation more vulnerable to attack from the outside. We are not using a full-time professional army, but citizen soldiers who fight in a time of dire need. The best and the brightest are taken from their positions in the civilian world to fight and die. Are we turning ourselves into a nation ripe for the pickings by a nation with a full-time professional army who are trained to conquer and kill, while their industry and farms continue with full manpower? Oh, probably not. We have nuclear weapons and high tech stuff that is mind boggling. Yet still, it gives one pause. Perhaps we should not commit our country to military engagements that are so large that we do not have the available manpower, unless we are dead serious and willing to commit the nation to those engagements with the kind of manpower needed. That is to say, if you're not willing to draft the men and women needed to carry out such a mission, it's probably not worth draining our resources from home to meet those needs via a back door draft (Calling up the Reserves and National Guard).
Following the logic of that argument, then perhaps it's time to get the heck out of Iraq, (I believe the President is planning for that end sometime next year.) and plan for an end to the mess in Afghanistan without committing more troops. I believe the mess in Afghanistan has spilled over into Pakistan, and is a problem for a lot of nations, not just the U.S. Perhaps the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians could take an interest in stopping the spread of radical Islamic fundamentalism and all that it represents. Perhaps it is enough in their interest that they too will commit a few troops to put the kabash on this mess.
All of that being said, I had a very nice day off from work. I did not celebrate the beginning of the European invasion of the Americas, nor did I partake of a Columbus Day mattress sale. I did, however, take advantage of an extra day off from work. For that I have to thank Chris Columbus. So a Happy Columbus Day to you all.
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