Columbus Day and the demise of greed

So this past week was "Columbus Day" and it was shocking to me that so many people and institutions still celebrate a day that for so many Native Americans remains in infamy.  Celebrating Columbus Day in my opinion is like celebrating the Holocaust.  The lack of clarity with which we still teach that Columbus "discovered" America seems to be deliberate.  Deliberately duping the American public has become almost a right of passage for politicians, historians, economists and anyone who will sell their moral integrity for money.  At a time when global protests are sparking up everywhere, beginning with the ousting of dictators in the Middle East to the Occupy Wall Street Movement, "ordinary" people are challenging the status quo and refusing to be duped any longer.  As a protester, I have been to Occupy Los Angeles as well as Occupy Ventura and I must say that the the "99%" who is disenfranchised, unemployed and underemployed is absolutely fed up with being lied to for the sake of greed.  On Columbus day I reflected on my 1998 Freshman year of college at the University of California, Santa Barbara and my excitement at seeing the chalk riddled pathways on campus which read "Columbus was a rapist."  I had never heard that statement in relation to Columbus but I knew that something never quite seemed right about a man discovering a land for which people already inhabited.  This type of skewed historical content is extremely one sided and blatantly questions our intelligence and ability decipher logic.  The 99% of us who are fed up, are fed up with being sent to war for economic gain, bailing out banks who destroyed our economy and face no reprise, for allowing the LGBT community to serve and die for this country but deny them the right to marry and for continuing to ignore an entire people who cultivated this land and replace their history by celebrating a man who if alive, should be tried for humanitarian violations, murder, rape, slave trading and stupidity.  I say "Stupidity" because, according to Americanindiansource.com, "the Egyptian-Greek scientist Eratosthenes already had measured the circumference and diameter of the world in the third century B.C."  Not to mention that "in the tenth century A.D., Al Maqdisi Monastery described the earth with 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude." (Just a little bit of real History for you). At this time in human history, all eyes are on the people of the world who demand change.  Because the United States is at the center of economic and military dominance, the catalyst for change must begin here.  As a country, we must admit that we were founded on greed, oppression and imperialist occupation.  We must admit that this system no longer has a place in this world and that if it persists, the United States as we know it, will and must fall.  The demise of a time when greed rules over morality is eminent and the people of the world are seeing to it that it does.