It looks like there’s push developing to change Columbus Day to Exploration Day. Here’s the rationale from the petition:

First celebrated nationally in 1937, Columbus Day pays homage to Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. It is, needless to say, viewed very differently by different groups of Americans. Some people forget it’s a holiday at all. Some Italian Americans see it as a point of cultural pride. Other people — especially Native Americans — point out that Columbus personally oversaw the murder and enslavement of thousands and see the holiday as an intrinsically cruel celebration of the beginning of a massive genocide and generations of oppression.

For some reason, we’ve been unable to deal with problem of Columbus Day, but now some folks on the Internet have a solution that actually makes a hell of a lot of sense: Replace Columbus Day with Exploration Day.

The logic is quite neat. Columbus Day is about one guy and the (actually untrue) claim that he was the first person to discover America. Inherently, that’s pretty Euro-centric, which is a big part of why it sits awkwardly in a pluralistic country. But exploration is inclusive. The ancestors of Native Hawaiians were explorers who crossed the ocean. The ancestors of Native Americans explored their way across the Bering land bridge and then explored two whole continents. If you look at the history of America, you can see a history of exploration done by many different people, from many different backgrounds. Sometimes we’re talking about literal, physical exploration. Other times, the exploring is done in a lab. Or in space. But the point is clear: This country was built on explorers. And it needs explorers for the future.

Unfortunately, this is as a pathetic attempt to sugar coat history. Yes, Columbus is directly responsible for the death of a lot of native people in the Caribbean islands he ruled over and yes, European settlers slaughtered a lot of people in the new world and they brought diseases that killed even more. However, it’s not like the pre-European settlement of the Americas was peaceful and it wasn’t one monolithic wave of people coming across the Bering land bridge. Each new wave that came across either killed or pushed south the wave that preceded them.

It’s really not much different than how Europe was settled. The first people to settle there 10s of thousands of years ago were displaced, destroyed, enslaved, and absorbed to make way for the next migration until finally the Germanic tribes and the Huns made their way over from Central Asia.

Yes, what happened is tragic and yes, Columbus is a rather unsavory historical figure if you look at him from a modern perspective. However, the simple fact stands that except for when there were no people there to greet them, human exploration has a very bloody track record.

If we want to replace it with a more modern and peaceful tribute to the human desire for progress, we could go with a Space Day, possibly on May 5 (Freedom 7) or July 20 (Apollo 11 moon landing), but don’t just take a holiday celebrating one bloody day and generalize it encompass countless more bloodshed.