Columbus Day
Or: Some days, I wish nobody ever taught me critical thinking.
Every year around this time, Facebook reminds me about this meme1 I post every year around this time. That’s the only reason I even know Columbus Day is around this time. Hell, I had to ask ChatGPT if “Columbus Day” is still the official name2. I honestly thought it had been replaced by Indigenous Peoples’ Day—but apparently that’s only used by Antifa members in good standing.
I legit chortle every time I see this. Columbus was an asshole who got lucky. Looking for a shortcut to existing trade routes, he stumbled into an entire hemisphere of happily undiscovered people. And then, like every opportunist backed by money and guns, he claimed the land where he’d run aground in the name of Spain. The meme nails that absurdity. It’s a reminder that what we celebrate as discovery was, for the people already living here, just the beginning of a very long home invasion.
Imagine walking into someone else’s house and claiming their favorite chair as your own. Or showing up at their job one morning and letting them know their services are no longer needed. That’s the essence of the joke, right? Columbus didn’t “discover” anything; he just wandered into someone else’s life, declared himself management, and started taking inventory. It’s funny because it’s true—an entire continent turned upside down by one guy’s bad sense of direction and worse sense of entitlement.
So of course I reposted this today—because fuck Christopher Columbus.
And then it hit me: this is more or less how a lot of reasonable people feel about undocumented immigrants.
The comparison isn’t crazy. Imagine living somewhere your whole life and watching strangers show up uninvited, move in next door, start working jobs that used to be yours, and fill classrooms and clinics that were already stretched thin. Imagine hearing a language you don’t speak everywhere you go, and feeling like the place you grew up is being slowly translated into something you no longer recognize. From that vantage point, “walking into someone else’s house and claiming their favorite chair” stops being a joke and starts feeling uncomfortably literal.
My condemnation of Columbus is, if I’m honest, entirely theoretical. He was the tip of the spear that decimated a contented people, but I’m a descendant of the culture that came after—the one that planted flags, paved roads, and built Costco where villages once stood. If I think Columbus was an asshole because of the devastation he set in motion, am I obligated to think undocumented immigrants are assholes too, for the disruptions they cause the people who live here now?
And if that’s true—if undocumented immigrants are the modern equivalents of uninvited houseguests staking a claim on someone else’s living room—then the corollary is just as uncomfortable: the current administration is only doing3 what the “natives” once did4. From their perspective, it’s defense. They’re fighting an encroachment they never asked for—one that feels like it’s eroding their way of life. It’s the same moral logic that drove Indigenous resistance centuries ago—except now it’s wielded by the descendants of conquerors, protecting the borders their ancestors drew. And if I call Columbus an asshole for invading someone else’s home, then what does that make the people kicking down doors in the name of defending mine?
If this all sounds like mental gymnastics, that’s because it is—but the kind worth doing. I’ve written before about why ethical consistency matters. I can’t claim to care about justice and then abandon consistency the moment it complicates my sympathies. Ethical coherence isn’t a luxury; it’s the only thing that separates conviction from convenience. Without it, outrage is just emotion in costume, moral judgment little more than performance art.
The problem is, coherence cuts both ways. Once you start demanding that your principles apply universally, the comfortable narratives start to buckle. You can’t keep the parts that make you feel righteous and discard the ones that make you queasy. Either the same logic condemns both Columbus and ICE, or it absolves them both. And if that sounds extreme, well—so is the history we inherited, and so are the policies playing out in its name.
So Who’s the Asshole?
If I strip away the history, the outrage, and the cultural baggage, what’s left are the same basic values on both sides of this equation: fairness, freedom, and dignity. The reason I think Columbus was an asshole isn’t just that he killed and enslaved people—it’s that he treated human beings as a means to an end. He saw other people’s lives as raw material for his own success, and the empires that followed perfected that logic. The moral offense wasn’t merely the claiming of inhabited lands; it was the entitlement behind it—the belief that his goals, his god, his gold, and his glory justified violence as the answers to anyone else’s right to live freely on their own land.
That same value—respect for human autonomy—is what drives my sympathy for people who cross borders today. They’re not coming to conquer; they’re coming to survive. They’re fleeing collapsing economies, violence, drought, or regimes propped up by the same global power structures Columbus helped set in motion. If his legacy was exploitation in pursuit of profit, theirs is desperation in pursuit of life. It’s not the mirror image of conquest—it’s the recoil.
So who’s the asshole? The answer hasn’t changed in five hundred years. It’s whoever’s holding the power and using it to treat human need as an inconvenience. When I condemn Columbus, I’m condemning domination as a way of being in the world. When I defend undocumented immigrants, I’m defending people who are trying to live despite domination. One act imposes suffering for gain; the other endures suffering for hope. Seen through that lens, the two are not contradictions but continuations of the same moral story—a story about whether we believe survival and dignity should ever have to compete.
They Took Our Jobs
So are undocumented immigrants really just walking into someone else’s house and claiming the furniture? Not even close. Most aren’t breaking in—they’re knocking on the side door because the front one’s been welded shut. They’re mowing the lawn, cleaning the kitchen, watching the kids, and fixing the roof while being told they don’t belong inside. It’s not a home invasion; it’s a home inspection we’ve chosen to ignore.
But the fear that it is an invasion feels real. If your mortgage is underwater, your job is precarious, and your healthcare plan has more loopholes than coverage, it doesn’t take much to feel like strangers are rearranging the furniture in your house. For a lot of Americans, that’s what immigration looks like. Wages are flat, rents are obscene, everything from groceries to gas costs more every year, and somehow the billionaires keep getting richer. Into that anxiety walks a new neighbor who doesn’t speak your language and seems to be doing fine. It’s easy to mistake proximity for causation.
But the jobs didn’t disappear because immigrants took them. They disappeared because corporations shipped them overseas, automated them, or converted them into “contractor opportunities” that pay half as much and offer no benefits. The public schools aren’t crowded because of the family that just arrived from Guatemala; they’re crowded because we keep cutting taxes for people who can afford private ones. Immigrants didn’t collapse the healthcare system either—decades of privatization and profit-seeking did that. The frustration is real; the target is wrong5.
This is where ethical consistency gets hard. Because the fear that drives anti-immigrant sentiment feels a lot like the fear that once drove Indigenous resistance: the sense of being squeezed out of your own home by forces beyond your control. The difference is, Indigenous peoples were right. They were literally being exterminated and displaced. Today’s working class is being gutted too—but by employers, not immigrants. The people we’re told to fear are suffering from the same disease we are; they just caught it earlier.
The tragedy is that outrage flows sideways instead of upward. We’ve been convinced to fight each other for scraps while the same interests that looted the last empire bankroll the next campaign cycle. Columbus may be dead, but his business model lives on: extract, exploit, divide, repeat.
Good Guys with Guns
If every story needs heroes and villains, then ICE is supposed to be the former—armed patriots defending the homeland from the invading hordes. That’s the story, anyway. But like most American myths, it falls apart as soon as you look closely. You don’t need to romanticize lawbreaking to see that the state’s version of self-defense looks a lot more like domination than protection. Raiding apartments without warrants, tearing families apart, detaining people indefinitely in places like Alligator Alcatraz—this isn’t “law and order.” It’s punishment in search of a crime.
The thing that makes the ICE comparison so grotesque is how far it stretches the language of justice. Many of the people it targets aren’t “illegals” in any meaningful sense. They entered through legal channels—student visas, work permits, refugee programs. And most that did enter without permission were fleeing persecution and are now engaged in the legal process of seeking asylum. They have permission to work. They pay taxes. They follow the same criminal codes as everyone else, but with one bonus penalty: the possibility of deportation6.
The more you learn about how this machine actually operates, the harder it is to keep calling it defense. Defense implies proportionality—resisting harm with just enough force to prevent it. What ICE does isn’t proportional; it’s performative. It’s violence dressed up as virtue, meant to reassure the people in power that they still control the borders they drew centuries ago. It’s the state playing cowboy—“good guys with guns” protecting us from the very people their policies helped displace.
If that sounds familiar, it should. The colonists told the same story about themselves. Manifest Destiny was just “good guys with guns” on horseback. The frontier was defended against “savages” who were only trying to stay alive in their own home. And now here we are, the descendants of those settlers, watching the same movie in tactical gear instead of leather vests. The props have changed; the plot hasn’t.
Violent resistance, I’ve argued elsewhere, can be justified when it’s the only remaining defense against domination—when every peaceful avenue has been closed and survival is on the line. Indigenous resistance met that test. ICE’s version does not. The difference isn’t in the method; it’s in the moral geometry of power. One side fought against erasure. The other fights to preserve its privilege. That’s not justice—it’s just inertia with a badge.
And honestly, once I’ve found solid ground for judging Columbus differently than today’s migrants, it hardly feels necessary to look for similar footing here. The moral terrain is obvious. If the first act of domination was the invasion, this is just the sequel—the powerful still mistaking enforcement for ethics, still telling themselves they’re the good guys because they’ve got the guns.
Consistency, or Something Like It
Ethical consistency isn’t about arriving at perfect answers. It’s about refusing to hide from hard ones. The point isn’t to prove that I’m right about Columbus or wrong about immigration; it’s to make sure I’m not lying to myself about why I believe what I do. If the same values that condemn conquest also compel compassion, then the work isn’t to justify my position—it’s to live it.
That’s harder than outrage. Outrage is easy. Outrage burns hot and dies quick. Consistency requires patience, humility, and the occasional swallowing of pride. It means checking whether the anger I feel is serving justice or just protecting my comfort. It means asking whether the story I’m telling about the world still holds up if I swap the heroes and villains.
Critical thinking sounded noble when they taught it in school. Nobody mentioned it would ruin holidays. It means seeing every side of a thing until there’s no safe corner left to stand in—and doing it anyway. I can’t fix the past, and I don’t have much power over the present, but I can at least be honest about which direction I’m facing. If I want a world built on fairness, freedom, and dignity, then I have to apply those values evenly—even when it complicates the plot. Especially then.
Because the point of ethical consistency isn’t to win the argument. It’s to stop repeating the same old story.
The word “meme” predates cats with spelling disorders by several decades. Richard Dawkins coined it in 1976, in The Selfish Gene, to describe a unit of cultural transmission—an idea, behavior, or image that reproduces itself through imitation. It was supposed to be a clever parallel to genes, except instead of evolving through DNA, memes evolved through brains and conversation and, eventually, AOL chat rooms.
Somewhere between The Matrix and Myspace, the term was hijacked by the internet, stripped of its philosophical dignity, and repurposed to mean ‘funny picture with caption.’ At first, a meme wasn’t a meme until a lot of people picked it up and remixed it to extend the joke. That at least met the spirit of Dawkins’s definition. Today, “meme” is used to refer to any old picture on the internet—everything from viral jokes to political propaganda to screenshots of tweets you didn’t write but wish you had. Eventually, someone will do a gallery showing of Yo Dawgs Through the Ages or Grumpy Cat: a Retrospective—at which point, your great grandkids will call everything hanging on a wall at the Met a meme. Our tendency to sap words of their precision until only synonyms remain is, in part, why we can’t have nice things.
Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937, back when “sailing the ocean blue” still sounded like noble ambition instead of catastrophic GPS failure. It began as an Italian-American pride project—Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law after lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, who were eager to enshrine their favorite accidental navigator as proof that Catholics could, in fact, be patriots. The holiday itself dates back to 1792, when New York held the first official celebration marking the 300th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival—which, for the record, was not in North America. The man never set foot on the continent, just a handful of Caribbean islands and a sliver of Central and South America, before getting himself arrested for tyranny and shipped home in chains. Heroic stuff.
Since the 1990s, cities and states have been quietly rebranding the day, swapping out Columbus for the people he “discovered.” South Dakota was first, renaming it Native American Day in 1990. By the 2010s, places like Alaska, Maine, New Mexico, Vermont, Minnesota, and Oregon had followed suit, officially recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead. Others—California, Colorado, Michigan, Wisconsin—observe both. Meanwhile, the federal government never got the memo, so the U.S. Postal Service still takes the day off to honor a guy who never set foot on the country whose discovery he’s credited with. It’s a very American compromise: half the nation celebrates survival, the other half celebrates a misunderstanding.
Specifically, the current federal administration treats migration less as a humanitarian or policy challenge and more as an insurgency. ICE has been turned loose as a blunt instrument—raiding workplaces without warrants, detaining people in violation of due process, and staging sweeps that look more like military operations than law enforcement. In Chicago, for instance, agents recently descended on a South Shore apartment building in what witnesses described as a “helicopter raid.” They kicked in doors, zip-tied residents, dragged children from their beds, and held dozens captive for hours without warrants or charges. Some of those detained were citizens; others had pending asylum cases or work permits. The administration calls it “border enforcement.” The people on the floor call it terrorism.
Meanwhile, “Alligator Alcatraz”—the sprawling detention complex built deep in the Everglades—has become its own national embarrassment. Erected with emergency funds and almost no environmental review, it sits partly on protected wetlands and on land sacred to the Miccosukee. Indigenous groups and environmental advocates sued, arguing violations of the Clean Water Act and treaty rights, and a federal judge has since ordered operations scaled back. The irony writes itself: a government imprisoning migrants on stolen land, forced to back down by the descendants of the people it stole it from. If history doesn’t repeat, it at least rhymes with a sneer.
I’m not talking about some sanitized image of feathers and peace pipes. I’m talking about settlers hacked to death at Gnadenhutten, women and children scalped along the Pennsylvania frontier, the ambush at Little Bighorn, and a hundred smaller massacres you never heard about because the other side had better publicists. The violence was real and, in many cases, horrifying.
But so were the provocations. For every burned wagon train, there were ten broken treaties. For every scalp, a stolen acre. Native nations fed and sheltered colonists through their first winters, taught them to grow food that would keep them alive, and tried—again and again—to negotiate coexistence. What they got in return were lies, land grabs, forced relocations, and the occasional genocide masquerading as progress. Violence wasn’t their first resort; it was what you do after every good-faith overture has been met with non-stop fuckings over by the United States government. (Yes, that’s the plural. The singular “fucking over” doesn’t capture the full sweep of U.S. Indian policy.)
Real wages for non-supervisory U.S. workers have barely budged since the 1970s, even as productivity has more than tripled. The cost of housing, healthcare, and higher education has risen two to five times faster than wages, while corporate profits have hit record highs. That’s not “market efficiency”; it’s wealth extraction disguised as innovation. CEOs now earn, on average, more than 300 times their median employee’s salary. In 1965, that ratio was 20-to-1. We’ve managed to build a society where people can work full-time and still qualify for public assistance, and then we call them lazy for taking it.
The polite term for this arrangement is “market capitalism,” but a more accurate one might be “government capture.” When the same corporations that offshore jobs and suppress wages also write the tax code, fund the campaigns, and staff the regulatory agencies, the line between policy and profiteering disappears. The top one percent now controls more wealth than the entire middle class combined, and they’ve convinced half the country that immigrants are to blame for it. Columbus would be proud.
The numbers don’t remotely match the rhetoric. Roughly half of the eleven million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. entered legally—on student, work, or tourist visas—and simply stayed after they expired. Many of the rest are in some stage of the asylum process, which, by law, entitles them to remain and to work while their claims are pending. According to the Department of Labor and multiple independent studies, undocumented workers contribute an estimated $12–$15 billion annually to Social Security and Medicare through payroll taxes they’ll never collect. Add state and local taxes and the total climbs to around $25 billion. So the old refrain about “not paying in” collapses under the weight of the receipts.
Legally, they’re also subject to every federal and state criminal statute that applies to citizens—plus the added penalty of deportation, which can be triggered by offenses as minor as a traffic violation. That means double jeopardy in practice if not in law: punished once by the court system and again by the immigration system. Yet even with that stacked deck, immigrants (documented and not) commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. You won’t hear that in the campaign ads, of course. Fear polls better than facts, and the machinery of enforcement runs smoother when the public believes it’s under siege.
Great work Brad. Really liked this one.
great article.