The Revolution Train, and Mr. Columbus

Have you ever felt like you wanted to be part of something bigger then yourself? Part of a movement? A revolution? Sometimes all it takes is a high school environment to make me feel as obscure as we all really are in relation to the entire world, let alone the entire universe. I've always wanted to do something huge, be a part of something. An invention, an idea, a perspective, anything. I want to build something just to look at the final result and be able to say, "this is here becuase of what I did". That satisfaction is what I am looking for. Much like parents probably feel after giving birth. They created that life, nobody else. That child is there solely because of them. I'm at a point in my life where everything is so ordinary its unbearable, and I'm looking for something to change that. On a separate note, theres been a few things on my mind lately. My topic of conversation: Mr. Chris Columbus. In AP world, the hellish class that it is, the one interesting perspective i have gotten is that Columbus was a douschebag. Hide the children, cover their ears, do what you have to, because we all know that since birth he has been an icon, even worthy of a day off of school. How could he ever be a douschebag you ask? Well, for starters, he didn't even find America. Someone else on his ship did, and Columbus just lied and said he had saw it days earlier and hadn't said anything. Columbus picked up a hefty reward for that "find". Now lets get to the real douschebaggery, the part where Columbus kills the shit out of all the Indians. Real icon. Now my class had a discussion, on if the slaughter of the indians was justified. The argument was that America would have never progressed if this "genocide" (not officially a genocide but along those lines) would have happened. My response to that, is the lives of innocent people worth the progress? Maybe the indians aren't well represented enough. So my example for this, the Jews. The holocaust was "progress" in Hitler's eyes, wasn't it? The word progress is not definite. It means different things to different people. So arguably, was the killing of the millions of Jews as well as millions of other people worth it for progress? Now obviously, Hitler's progress was a little less appealing to the general popluation (settle down all you KKK and neo-Nazis) but think about it from the indian's perspective(and they were called indians, because Columbus thought he landed in India). They are the voice that is not heard, nor taught, but suffered just as much as the other atrocities this world has seen. So Chris Columbus, Douschbag of the day. Congratulations, now you rightly earned your respective day. Be ready for some more opinions in days to come, this is just the beginning.