Cox and Forkum offer an excellent piece on the destruction of Columbus Day with their usual ascerbic wit and insightful commentary and this article from the Ayn Rand Institute by Michael Berliner:
On Columbus Day, Celebrate Western Civilization, Not Multiculturalism
"Columbus Day this year has a special meaning. Christopher Columbus is a carrier of Western civilization and the very values attacked by terrorists two years ago on September 11. To the "politically correct," Columbus Day is an occasion to be mourned. They have mourned, they have attacked, and they have intimidated schools across the country into replacing Columbus Day celebrations with "ethnic diversity" days.The politically correct view is that Columbus did not discover America, because people had lived here for thousands of years. Worse yet, it's claimed, the main legacy of Columbus is death and destruction. Columbus is routinely vilified as a symbol of slavery and genocide, and the celebration of his arrival likened to a celebration of Hitler and the Holocaust. The attacks on Columbus are ominous, because the actual target is Western civilization."
In my view, yet another sound reason for school vouchers.
Underlying the political collectivism of the anti-Columbus crowd is a racist view of human nature. They claim that one's identity is primarily ethnic: if one thinks his ancestors were good, he will supposedly feel good about himself; if he thinks his ancestors were bad, he will supposedly feel self-loathing. But it doesn't work; the achievements or failures of one's ancestors are monumentally irrelevant to one's actual worth as a person. Only the lack of a sense of self leads one to look to others to provide what passes for a sense of identity. Neither the deeds nor misdeeds of others are his own; he can take neither credit nor blame for what someone else chose to do. There are no racial achievements or racial failures, only individual achievements and individual failures. One cannot inherit moral worth or moral vice. "Self-esteem through others" is a self-contradiction.
This is exactly what the proponents of illegal immigration and diversity for the sake of maintaining PC racial or ethnic quotas do not understand. Fortunately some of us do, as Californian voters demonstrated last week.