The essential feature of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.
~DSM-IV-TR
One must wonder how it is that Americans celebrate a day like Columbus Day. Even worse, one wonders how Americans do not demand that it be stripped of its place in the American cluster of days to be celebrated. Only a country with a collective Narcissistic Personality Disorder would dare honor this day.
Unlike the propaganda taught in American schools of how the natives welcomed us and offered their generosity in assisting us with the growth of corn, the reality of “American Discovery” is brutal, barbaric and just plain gross. Yet Americans seem to wonder about content to honor the likes of Christopher Columbus, the early colonizers, and the great aptitude they apparently had in the realm of survival. It is as if in the American collective conscious the millions of natives living here did not exist at all.
Many will argue that the people of today can not be held to account for the sins of their fathers, and to a certain extent there is some truth to this premise; however, Americans continue to honor this day and the acts of Christopher Columbus as if it they are actually something deserving of our praise. Even now, the state of natives living in America is bleak. As one example, Amnesty International recently released a report highlighting the sexual assault and rapes of natives living on reservations, where the perpetrator rapes with impunity and confidence, knowing no one will investigate the crime, no one, including Federal Authorities.
If historians are correct and the cumulative statistics of European conflict and conquest are assessed with any honesty, Columbus Day would need to change its name to something like Genocide Day. According to author and historian Mark Cocker, …eleven million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the eighty years following the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the Andean empire of the Incas the figure was more than eight million. In Brazil the Portuguese conquest say Indian numbers dwindle from a pre-Columbian total of almost 2,500,000 to just 225,000. And to the north of Mexico it has now been widely accepted that Native Americans declined from an original population of more than 8,000,000 to 800,000 by the end of nineteenth century. For the whole of the Americas, some historians have put the total losses as high as one hundred million.
True to form, Americans tend to have a short attention span and certainly lack in their ability to empathize. The continued oppression of indigenous peoples around the globe is more than enough evidence to support such a charge. Paul Farmer, human rights activist, physician and author documents this continued oppression well in his most recent book Pathologies of Power-Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor, where he rightfully charges …structural violence, which influences the nature and distribution of extreme suffering as oppressions main cause. The most basic right, “the right to survive” continues to be trampled on by those in power. He argues: “Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will b shielded from harm.”
Of course we can not lay the blame for the suffering of all indigenous people both present and past solely on the shoulders of Columbus, but certainly we can discontinue our celebrations of his genocidal actions. Are the Arawak Indians who Columbus contemptuously kidnapped, enslaved, and subsequently wiped out not deserving of our remembrance? According to historian Howard Zinn …the Indians were taken as slave labor and on huge estates, known as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.
Indeed, only a country with no conscious at all could honor the man responsible for committing genocide, especially in the name of progress. It is this continued lack of empathy that has allowed the oppression and death of millions, simply for the sake of furthering our own agendas. Zinn continues: This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
Certainly all indigenous peoples around the globe who struggle against America’s continued hegemony can testify as to how this deadly attitude and apathy has impacted their life, suffering, and death. Sadly, it will be up to the snoozing populace of Americans to wake each other to the atrocities being committed in their names – perhaps then, the indigenous people around the globe will finally have justice.
