Way back around 1970, Joseph Colombo,the head of the Columbo/Profaci Family a criminal organization and one of Metro New York’s Five Families started showing up in respectable places with classy WASP types and talking about Italian-Americans being unfairly stereotyped as gangsters and criminals. Everybody was dancing around the fact that Joe was a gangster and a criminal, but, hey, I guess they wanted the garbage picked up at their co-op. He started an organization called the Italian-American Antidefamation League. The League started lobbying for Columbus Day as a national holiday. Congress came through for the poor slandered Italian-Americans and we had Columbus Day. Try sailing West with navigational aids any Boy or Girl Scout could make and use, with wind and ocean currents as the sole means of power and I think one can appreciate the magnitude of Columbus’s accomplishment. Oh and he made it back too. But the greatness of the accomplishment from a fifteenth century perspective didn’t matter to Congress or Joe Colombo. Congress wanted to throw a bone and Colombo wanted to catch it. Despite his efforts for more positive recognition of the Italian-Americans, Colombo ended up getting shot and paralyzed at one of his Italian-American “civil rights” rallies. There was some discord in Mr Colombo’s Family and let’s just say it wasn’t over Mama Colombo’s recipe for Sicilian Gravy. So Columbus Day, which nobody gave a rip about prior to Mr Colombo’s endeavours, became a “holiday”, in other words, another day where you don’t get the mail.  America’s aggrieved malcontents,, suckling at the breast of free speech, have used Columbus Day as an opportunity to grouse about every American born with the skin pigment popularly called “white”. I don’t much care for Columbus Day. I’d rather get the mail. But I also don’t much care for collections of individuals, once called “mobs”, tearing down statues of Columbus and city officials displaying a cowardice as equally despicable in letting them do it. A figure from history, nearly contemporary to Columbus, Martin Luther, was all into reforming The Church, Then some German peasants got the idea of reforming politics and government. Not surprisingly, blood started to flow and Luther thought the princes had better restore order and deal, rather ruthlessly, with the peasants. Order is a good idea, you might say.