It’s Indigenous People’s Day! I hope everyone takes a moment to think about the people who were here in the Americas first.

You know what weirds me out, that I find terribly troubling about humanity? That in 1492 an intelligent man made a long, difficult journey from Europe to the Caribbean, where he met the Taíno people and their sophisticated culture, and he decided that the appropriate thing to do was to use guns and swords to enslave, rape, mutilate, and murder people to steal their labor and wealth. I don’t understand that at all. It’s certainly not how I would respond to discovering a new civilization, even if it was militarily weaker than mine. This would be an opportunity to learn new ideas and, even if I was a capitalist at heart, establish new trade networks of mutual benefit.

Fortunately, to feed my cynicism and learn how that could be, all I have to do is open today’s newspaper.

There’s Trump, baiting audiences with an opportunity to use a racial slur.

Surrounded by his adoring flock, Trump bellowed, “You know Putin mentioned the n-word. Do you know what the n-word is?”

Plenty of people shouted the answer they thought Trump was looking for — because there is only one answer. Hardly surprised by the response to his purposefully provocative question, Trump jumped in and said, “No, no, no, it’s the ‘nuclear’ word.”

There’s Tommy Tuberville, inciting racists with his claim that the Democrats want to support reparations because, in his mind, the victims of slavery are synonymous with the perpetrators of crimes. Hey, Tommy, the criminals were the ones who kidnapped people and then made them work in cane and tobacco and cotton fields. But as one of the dumbest people in the Senate, you wouldn’t know that.

Tuberville, appearing with Trump in a rural area of Nevada in support of those candidates, first told the crowd that the Democratic Party is “pro-crime, they want crime.” Then he exclaimed, “They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have.” What that means is hard to say, but GOP leaders know their base well, so telling the audience that Democrats want to steal what you have was the message Tuberville believes will animate some Republican voters.

Tuberville’s comment that caused such a backlash must also be viewed in the same light. Raising his voice in anger, the senator shouted, “They want reparations, because they think the people that do the crime are owed that! Bullsh**!” That line drew big cheers from the audience, with Tuberville adding, “They are not owed that.”

Then you see right-wing radio hosts blaming the Holocaust on LGBTQ people.

Do you know that part of the Weimer Republic was social degeneracy Europe had never seen before? Do you know, the whole LGBTQ thing? Do you know, that was going wild in places like Berlin at this time? And do you know that there were so many Germans, Jew-hatred or not, so many Germans who were willing to accept anything to make that degeneracy stop? They wanted it stopped. This is actually part – I’m glad you brought this up. This is part of why I’ve been warning time and time and time again – not cheering for – warning.

We’re still finding the bodies of dead Indian children at boarding schools.

Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. Though we don’t know how many children were taken in total, by 1900 there were 20,000 children in Indian boarding schools, and by 1925 that number had more than tripled. The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. They suffered physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse and neglect, and experienced treatment that in many cases constituted torture for speaking their Native languages. Many children never returned home and their fates have yet to be accounted for by the U.S. government.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at what that jerk Columbus did when he found new people — he exploited them.

I suggest a taxonomic revision. No longer “Homo sapiens,” because boy, that is a misnomer, and instead classify us as “Homo culus,” because we’re naturally assholes.