So today was Columbus Day, and aside from a lack of postal service, most people not working for the Leviathan simply shrugged and said “ehh, so what”.
But before I get into that, I’ve got something else for you. I happen to be a member of the Social Concerns committee at church. Almost all the other churches in our Yearly Meeting that have such a committee call it the Peace and Social Concerns, but there’ll be none of that for the fighting Quakers of BFC - we may be socially concerned, but we draw the line at that pinko commie “Peace” stuff.
Anyways, as October is also Hunger Month, the clerk brought an email with some fairly dismal statistics about Idaho’s poverty problems, and this little gem sparked some discussion:
Idaho’s welfare laws rate 51st compared to all other states and Washington, D.C. when ranked for their likelihood to encourage and support families’ efforts to become economically self-sufficient. (Tufts University’s Center on Hunger and Poverty)
As one of the more “traditional” members of the committee remarked – “Well, if they didn’t ‘need’ a second color TV, maybe they wouldn’t ‘need’ to be on welfare.” which seemed to me to be rather unorthodox position for a Christian to take, but hey, what do I know?
I wonder what she would have said if I’d told her I think that the reason we have the poor is because we need the poor – we need the poor to pick our crops and we need them to sell them to us with a perky smile. We need someone to work cheap, someone willing to sacrifice their backs and their lives and their kid’s health to support our middle class lifestyle. You’d think we could at give them a hand every once in a while, but apparently we need someone to spit on as well.
Now then, back to Columbus Day. Remember what a big deal they made about it when we were in school? How they’d dress up some of the kids like Indians and some of the kids got to be Columbus and his Merry Crew and we’d re-enact the glorious moment that civilization finally arrived in the New World. All the real Indian kids in the class loved it, or at least they probably would have, if there had actually been any real Indian kids to be found. But they never let us reenact the really good stuff – like the working all the natives to death on the plantations and in the mines, and replacing them with more disease-resistant Africans.
We don’t really recognize that much – that we built this country on slavery and theft, and that we keep it running on cheap labor and endless consumption. And that that must be the way we want it, because that's the way we keep it.
Well, anyways – happy Columbus Day.
So, I survived the concert. It was pretty much what I'd expected and hoped it would be, that is - loud, fast, ear-bleeding metal. It was the "classic" lineup, and they stuck to playing "classic" songs, which was good because I wouldn't have recognized anything they wrote after 1992. 
