Columbus Day and the dangers of Identity Politics

Just some random federal holiday, not a specific one
like the sign usually indicates.  I give Columbus Day five years. 

Apart from practical considerations, Identity Politics ( a natural outgrowth of Multi-Culturalism) as typically understood (focusing on people as expedient demographics rather than as human beings) flies in the face of forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation.

Nowhere is that clearer than the annual trash fests of all that is white, European and American Christian.  First comes Columbus Day, then comes Thanksgiving Day.  Both Columbus and the Pilgrims stand condemned for what people did centuries later.  Why?  Look at their ethnicity, their national origins, their religion.  You've seen one white, European and American Christian, you've seen all the Nazis, yesterday and today.

Setting aside the obvious bigotry based on race, nationality and religion, as well as the whole notion of collective guilt, we also have the fact that Identity politics makes much about hatred, resentment, and a refusal to forgive.  Then there is a heaping helping of judgment.  We get to define people entirely by their sins, or even a sin.  Or heck, by sins of others.  No more looking at the whole person.  We see their sin, we condemn them as being nothing but their sin, we move on.

Everyone knows that the Pilgrims more or less got along well with the native inhabitants, and even forged a peace treaty that lasted almost 50 years.  That wasn't a bad record for any time or place.  But it matters not.  They stand condemned - not even accused, just condemned - for everything that would happen over the next several centuries. We won't even get into Columbus, who barely passes Himmler on the post-modern likability scale.

It stands to reason that whatever sins existed among the Native populations are all but dismissed.  Whatever they did, they're off the hook.  They are ascribed the purest motives, and if they tortured or murdered the immigrants from Europe, it matters not. Those immigrants, part of the Great White Army (I've heard it called), got what they had coming.  Sort of retro-consequentialism.  We know what happened in history, so if the children of European settlers were tortured and killed, eh.  No problem.

There are so many deliciously blasphemous and unchristian teachings that go behind the multi-cultural Identity Politics approach to these holidays.  Moral relativity, cultural superiority, racial absolution, justifying vengeance and intolerance, excusing or even encouraging the refusal to forgive, to reconcile, to show mercy - why the list is endless!

Of course non-Christian American Indians are under no compunction to forgive or show mercy or seek to understand.  Nobody is.  Vengeance, resentment, blame, excuse making - these are standard operating procedures, and people have used them for eons.

But for Christians who side with this movement, caution is suggested.  How can Christians align with a political tactic that ignores the millions who don't care, who do forgive, who do love America and its history, who understand wrong was done but don't judge entire civilizations or even entire people based on the worst, in order to zero in on that percentage that wants its pound of flesh?  Remember, dismissing the teachings of the Faith is still wrong, even when everyone at all the best parties among our cultural elites say otherwise.