Yesterday, I happened to glance at the calendar in the kitchen and I saw it marked Indigenous Peoples Day. I was a bit confused for a moment, until I realized I had a woke calendar. Apparently, this is the right way to call it now because Columbus Day is offensive. It doesn’t matter anymore that the poor devil made the dangerous trip to America and put it in the map. Some say he was trying to find a new route; others say that he had other endeavors looking for riches, and lately, it is believed that he was a protector of the Jews living in the border between France and Spain, and might have been of the Jewish faith himself, which he hid, according to new letters revealing hidden symbolism. In Basque country, during that time, Basques, Jews, and Muslins lived in peace, until they were invaded by Spain. He was trying to find a safe place for his people, according to this new theory. No one will ever know for sure, I guess.

I also guess that we “old farts” should forget everything we learned at school long time ago and embrace the new ways of calling things (at the time of this writing, they are proposing to rename many military bases) because we might offend without intention a fragile soul, if we use an old concept/name. I always thought that the day celebrated or made a point of the discovery of the new world. I understand that with it, came genocide and slavery, a very sad and dark part of our history, and something we should never forget. Yesterday, we celebrated the indigenous peoples, which should have been celebrated long time ago, and not as a byproduct of wokeness.

I don’t like that in the name of being woke we are sweeping history under the rug, ignoring it, and practically erasing it. Erasing history is where the danger hides. A society that forgets where it has come from is doomed to end there one day. As for me, I will keep calling it Columbus Day, not because I like the old explorer, but because for me, it represented the day a new world was discovered, the one in which I live, and love.

One day, the world I grew up in will disappear, and things will not be called the same. Will I be deemed confused, disoriented or a candidate for senile dementia by some woke health practitioner? I can see an entire generation being misdiagnosed in their late years – “Patient does not know what day it is, makes up names for holidays, and becomes argumentative when questioned; might become combative at times, when corrected and reoriented.”