Happy Monday, All!
And, if you catch my drift, Happy Columbus Day! Back in the day, I used to do a little stand up comedy: amatuer night once or twice at NYC’s famed “Catch A Rising Star” – tough crowds there. I remember starting one routine with” “Do you guys really think that the King and Queen of Spain really gave Chris The Nina, The Pinta and The Santa Maria so he could discover America, as if it were lost, or were they just trying to get rid of him and his cronies?” Nevertheless, here we are today!
Many of us have a long weekend, but I will be going in to work today. Now, I am not complaining of course because I DO have a job …. and it beats a lot of things I have done in the past 7 years or so …. so I am cool with that! In White Plains where I taught Social Studies for 10 years, Columbus Day was pretty much just another day out of school …. for the students. Still, I used to try to drill home the point that the Native Americans were already here and may not have necessarily wanted to be “discovered” by Chris and the Crew, which then led to a mass exodus of people from Western European countries seeking to “colonize” a land where people already existed and lived in their own “way of life”!
Nowadays, here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, Americans are protesting the state of affairs in our national economy, the jobless rate, the fact that businesses and banks have been bailed out time and time again and now … folks want to occupy and protest at financial centers in major cities like Wall Street in New York City and the fervor is spreading. After all, if you look back at the basic premises of what “this country” was founded on during the American Revolution as we know it, we do have the right of freedom of assembly, free speech and …. though now it has been taken to an extreme …. the right to bear arms! Eeeeeck!
A Native American friend of mine, Kevin Gover, and his wife posted some pictures on Facebook of their visit to a village of the Qechua community high in the Andes Mountains in a Sacred Valley of the Inkas in South America. They also have pictures of the famous Peruvian site known as Machu Picchu It brought back memories of the historical regions and ruins I visited in Colombia when I lived and taught there for five years. The native inhabitants of this land – The Americas – had a somewhat archaic lifestyle, but it was naturally theirs!
May we Observe, Learn and Live ….
Peace,
John I. Cook, Director
Educational Excellence 