No current celebrations highlight America’s contradictions as vividly as the simultaneous observance of Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Monday. There is no need to recount here the trail of tragedies in Columbus’s wake, that he was obsessed with the quest for gold and the subsequent enslavement and decimation of Native Americans.
At the same time, Italian Americans paraded in his memory, and countless numbers of Native Americans recalled their ancestors in colorful ceremonies. As Paul Starr has reminded us in his book “American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now,” our nation was built on the tension between freedom and slavery, and he goes on to show that these contradictions are not isolated but form a pattern “that explains the country’s polarization and political volatility.”
I thought about this historic tension the other day as Mayor Mamdani struggled with explaining the Hamas atrocity of 2023 and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. How can Italian-Americans gather to honor someone who massacred thousands of people as they pay tribute to their national heritage?
And I thought of another contradiction with the botched execution of Christa Pike, and then administering ways to salvage her life.
Let me close with the latter portion of Mr. Starr’s analysis, about the country’s division that shifted dramatically from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, and we may get a few more examples of this polarity after the midterm elections.
