A Rant on Human Stupidity.

Ok, I know that ranting about human stupidity is really pointless. It could even be said to be stupid. But I must.

I was reading an article online on Monday that talked about how schools are “Teaching the Darker side of Columbus.” Like ti was a new thing. Good old Christopher C has been the whipping boy of the “we hate white European males” crowd for quite some time. There was a LOT of stupid stuff talked about in the article but one line just reached out and grabbed me because it is a really, REALLY stupid saying. An elementary school teacher said “Columbus couldn’t have discovered America. After all, people were already living there.” Now, Columbus came from Europe where no one had any good idea that there was an extra continent between them and Asia going west. It was unknown, it was undiscovered. He stumbled upon it by accident, didn’t really know what he had found at first but he certainly “discovered” it in the context of his society, culture, and civilization. To say otherwise is really moronic. Sort of like saying the no one discovered radiation because it had always been there.

I actually heard a man use that line in person once: In a graduate level education class. I resisted the urge to verbally abuse the fellow out of deference to the teacher. (This was a teacher who later showed the trailer for Disney’s Pocahontas movie and told us how that would be a great tool to teach “native American” culture. I did not let that lunacy pass unchallenged but that is another story.)

I am boggled by the politically correct drivel that some people accept. Any person with even a partial understanding of history could not with any degree of honesty make such a load of hogwash. Heck, if they knew the meaning of the word discover they could see that the use is correct. People discover things everyday that other people have known about for ages. Bands, Bars, restaurants, historical reality, the fact that crying about something won’t change it, all of these are things that get discovered all the time.

So, I have to ask myself, is that teacher I quoted deliberately lying, hence evil, or is he just a flaming moron? My guess is a moron.