COLUMBUS GETS AROUND There are certainly a number of people who are observing today as holiday honoring Christopher Columbus. Some people claim him to to be the man who discovered America; others blame him for the same achievement.
He has been, in our time, lowered a few pegs on the admiration scales. It is evident from the resources available to us today, that he was one among many young men, who, in his day, had the very same spirit which today tells thousand of young men and women of the same unquenchable spirit they are destined to become some form of the group we currently limit to the word form: "astronaut."
We know far more about space today than Columbus knew about the strange area he was to explore and explain. His, too, was a big task, just as monstrous as space mysteries are to young people today. There is an unswerving challange in all it all both the "worst" and the "best" are to to be fathomed as theories much less as deeds yet to be done.
Old Voyager I and II are still out there chugging along as primitive
space craft even as far better examples of what we can do are to be seen in our space shuttles - all sent into the endless wilderness of space by at same desperate urge which compelled Christopher Columbus to continue to make his dangerous trips into the unknown seas of planet Earth.
We move the observance of Columbus Day to suit the need of long weekends in the D.C. area. Traditionally it ought to be October 12th, but the ninth day will do as long as we all remember and appreciate that which one man did for all of us in year of 1492.
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net 10-9-06 [c305wds]
