I was born on Columbus Day, 1954 and as a child was more than willing to accept the conventional hero stories of that era. Later, when my friends and I were old enough to  read objectively and think for ourselves, many of us became appalled, as are countless others, by the real story of Columbus: the  destruction of native people and their cultures, the cruelty, greed, arrogance.  The writings of European men who came to the New World primarily to plunder it are notoriously unreliable, but now and then you can find a passage that shimmers almost against the writer’s will with astonishment at the natural abundance of North America. To anyone with the capacity to appreciate it, the experience must have been mind-blowing. Although most of the pages of Christopher Columbus’s journals are dry and practical and self-serving, when he wrote about seeing Cuba for the first time, he burst into  poetry.  But notice how quickly the language turns cold as he converts his marvels into commodities:

“…And flocks of parrots that obscure the sun; and there are birds of so many kinds and sizes, and so different from ours, that it is a marvel. And also there are trees of a thousand kinds and all with their own kinds of fruits and all smell so that it is a marvel. I am the most sorrowful man in the world, not being acquainted with them. I am quite certain that all are things of value, and I am bringing samples of them and likewise of the plants.”