Ep. 348 - The Great Columbus
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
167.04143
Summary
Happy Columbus Day, everybody! Today is a day to remember a great man. Why was he great? Well, because he sailed across uncharted waters to an unknown destination, and then he did it 3 more times. And in the process, he vastly expanded our knowledge and understanding of the world.
Transcript
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Happy Columbus Day, everybody, and congratulations to anybody out there who actually gets to take off on Columbus Day.
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I think that's a group that's now limited to public school teachers and post office employees.
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I don't know if anyone else gets off anymore for Columbus Day, but it is a day to remember a great man.
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And yes, I say a great man. Christopher Columbus was a great man.
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Why was he great? Well, because he sailed across uncharted waters to an unknown destination,
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and then he did it three more times. And in the process, he vastly expanded our knowledge and understanding of the world.
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He planted the seeds of Western civilization. He changed the globe. He changed the course of history.
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He had an impact on civilization that has lasted for 500 years and will last for 500 more than 1,000 years after that.
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I would say that's something, isn't it? That's kind of impressive, maybe worthy of a statue, maybe worthy of your own day.
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Now, if you want to have your own day in the future, you want to have your own statue, then do the same thing.
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Change the course of history. Go ahead and try, if it's so easy to do.
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One thing I'll say about Columbus Day, he certainly had an impact on history that far exceeds the impact
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that his ungrateful modern critics, who enjoy the bounty of Western civilization,
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while whining about the men who provided that bounty to them, will have.
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Because those people who sit on Twitter and complain and say,
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Christopher Columbus, he was a genocidal maniac, those people are going to die and be forgotten.
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Because they're not doing anything with their lives.
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Christopher Columbus is remembered 500 years later.
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All I'm going to say is this, is that if, and hopefully maybe we can at least agree on this score.
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If you can't even drive to the neighboring state, I forget about that.
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If you can't even drive to your neighboring town, if you can't even drive to your local grocery store,
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without the help of a satellite orbiting the earth, giving you step-by-step instructions,
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saying, turn left here, turn right there, go 1.2 miles, turn right.
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if you can't even get to your CVS five blocks away,
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Then maybe you can at least admit that it's kind of impressive that Columbus and his crew managed to make a voyage across thousands of miles of open ocean,
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and then make it to a certain area on the map that wasn't even on the map yet,
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Using routes, by the way, that are still used today.
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Yes, it's true that Columbus committed the sin of not already having a completed map in front of him.
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Well, in fact, if you had a completed map, you couldn't use it,
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and I gave you a map to show you how to get to Lexington, Kentucky,
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is because no one had made a map of the world yet,
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and the reason no one had made a map of the world
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is that no one had seen the entire world, okay?
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The Vikings didn't understand what they had discovered.
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But yeah, Leif Erikson, I mean, give the Vikings credit too.
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cross the entire expanse of the continental U.S.
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You have no idea how long you're going to be gone
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and to prevent them from throwing you overboard
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when they get sick and tired of being on the ship
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and to make sure that everyone doesn't starve to death