Monday Morning Quotes

Monday Morning Quotes
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Since 1998 I've been sending out these reflections first thing each week--one or more quotes plus my thoughts about the intersections and contradictions. They're archived here back to 2002, and a new one is posted every Monday morning. Dialogue is still welcome . . .

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Quote #1156 - #ExplorersDay

14 Oct, 2024

EXPLORERS DAY


"To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an idealogical choice. It serves--unwittingly--to justify what was done."
Howard Zinn
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

"Many Americans still see the navigator as a symbol of their country's origins. Others see him as a progenitor of colonialism, enslavement, and genocide."
Conor Friedersdorf
"The Case for Explorers' Day"
The Atlantic

"I have found that every experience is a form of exploration."
Ansel Adams


I gave up on honoring Christopher Columbus
long before the country did
and have often espoused the questioning
of the path trod by those we studied
as the great explorers.
What havoc they wreaked on the lands they explored.
And who really did the exploring?
The myth of the lone white man braving the new land is
just that, a myth--
the local guides were the ones who knew the territory
and did the work,
including the work of keeping them all alive.

And yet, indigenous populations explored as well,
and some wreaked their own havoc on other populations
at the same time that they grew worlds.

History is incredibly complicated.
And the more we know, the more we question
what we do not know,
what we are not told.

More to come on that front.

For today, Explorers' Day:

Let us honor the complexity of experience
and exploration, for
every experience has the potential for exploration,
wide and/or deep,
and every exploration
is a complex experience with inherent discoveries
and, too, destructions.

Shellen Lubin
October 14, 2024



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