"What do you know?"

I checked a book out of our library recently entitled, “1421, The Year China Discovered America”, by Gavin Menzies.  It is very well written and researched.  He bases his title on many years of research into ancient maps, artifacts and genetic offspring of China, around the world.  I would tend to believe his research, but in K-6, in Ohio, I was taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America on October 12^th, 1492.  I “knew that to be true” for most of my life, since I believed what my teachers taught me.  Such faith.  I have since realized that what we are taught in school is the best guess of the present day society and that what we learn in our place of worship, from its bible,  is the mythology of the age in which it was written and the knowledge of the present day gullible.  One likes to believe what they believe, despite evidence to the contrary.  Scientists wander around our universities believing that the Universe was created when a bit of matter and energy, the size of a pin head, had a “Big Bang” and grew to over fifty billion light years across and is growing larger as the power of our telescopes increases.  I chuckle at this theory today as scientists will in the future.  I think what we “know” may relate to time and what sources we have faith in.

I had a vested interest in the Columbus theory, since I was born on October 12^th, in Columbus, Ohio.  For those of you readers born recently, Columbus Day was celebrated on October 12^th, until 1970, when it was bastardized, to be celebrated on the second Monday of October.  I liked it on the 12^th, when the whole nation celebrated my birthday with me.  Now, ask yourself, what does “discovered” mean?  Well, for Christopher Columbus, it meant bringing news back to his community, Spain, that a place exists that they previously had no knowledge of.  Columbus brought back erroneous information.  He didn’t land in India as he imagined.  He didn’t even land on the main North American Continent.  He landed on islands, off of the continent, in the area of The Bahamas and folks were already living there, so how could he have discovered it?  This sort of discovery is similar to one a young man named Rocco made in 1996.  Taking a Greyhound for a journey from the Bronx to The Midwest, exploring the area, later returning to the Bronx to tell his friends about the strange land and about the strange civilization that he had encountered was indeed a “discovery”.   We shouldn’t further diminish Columbus’s discovery by mentioning that there is fairly well supported theory that Leif Ericson landed on the American Continent as part of a Norse expedition sometime in the 11th century.  And once again, the Native Americans were already there.  I am a native American.  I was born here and so were my folks.  There is a group of Native Americans that our troops drove off of their land centuries ago, but now our government gives their descendants healthcare, a college education, the right to operate casinos in states where gambling is illegal and reserves ground for them.  There is another group of Native Americans, called Mexicans, which our soldiers also drove off of their land centuries ago, but our government has built a fence to keep them from returning and our government’s only gift to them is grief.  Go figure.

So, “What do you know?”  You know what you have been taught or have learned through your own research and if it happens to agree with reality, then it approaches truth.  I think there is damn little of that, but it is certainly worth searching for.  If there is a reason for the search for truth, it is why we came.  Enjoy the journey.

Comments are welcome, Old Buz