QUESTIONING THE LEGACY OF COLUMBUS. FEARING THE LESSONS OF COLUMBINE

If you missed the special meeting of your city council on Tuesday, June 21, you might be unaware of the issue that burns in the souls of a number of your neighbors. These are stressful times, so understandably you may have been too busy dealing with everyday life to attend or tune-in.

If gas and grocery prices have you struggling to make ends meet and your kid’s college fund is dwindling by the hour, this might be a bad time to ask you to go watch a recording of the meeting, which one might call the trial of Christopher Columbus.

On that Tuesday evening, the great explorer stood trial before the honorable city council where a wacky fringe of Watertown’s Progressive Left prosecuted an open and shut case against the man who in fourteen hundred and ninety-two sailed the ocean blue for the express purpose of turning peaceful natives into slaves and forcing them to mine for gold so he could send the loot and the slaves he didn’t need back to Spain to pay off his employers and investors.

The prosecutor, whose name is Mishy, told us that when slaves failed to find gold, they would have their hands cut off. After hearing her say that, I have no doubt that if Columbus were alive today, he would be rotting away in the supermax prison in Colorado after being captured by Seal Team Six.

Thankfully, most of what we call civilization has evolved since the fifteenth century. We did away with the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, slavery, and performing surgery without anesthesia.

Is it okay to allow people to honor Columbus the adventurer, the navigator, and the discoverer and recognize that he was a product of an old world where expansion was inevitable?

At Tuesday’s trial, members of our Italian-American community mounted a passionate but hopeless defense. When Progressives are on a mission, they show up organized, rehearsed, and morally empowered. And they show up as a voting block with a track record of delivering at the polls. 

Spectators from Newton, Malden, and Cambridge felt compelled to add their proverbial two cents, giving the proceedings a kind of regional flavor. (Thanks for your interest folks but please mind your own business.)

City hall’s Richard E. Mastrangelo Chamber was packed and so noisy that Mastrangelo could not be heard rolling over in his grave.

From the very start, the trial was heated and that’s an understatement. The council president gave fair warning that the rules would be obeyed or the gavel would pound. And pound it did, again and again, as the two-minute time limit for comments was routinely ignored by commenters on both sides of the issue.

The famously even-tempered president reached his boiling point, which thanks to the noncompliance of the angry crowd, kept on boiling.

Chief prosecutor Mishy led the proceedings by laying out the case that Columbus enslaved, tortured, and murdered Indigenous people and really had not discovered America, so he was pretty much a phony hero who didn’t deserve to have his name commemorated on a local rock that few people ever noticed – a rock that says (or screams, depending on your point view) Columbus Delta.

Bottom line: The Delta needs to be renamed and the pornographic rock needs to be sledgehammered into smithereens.

Mishy informed us that “one of the greatest expressions of love is to tell the truth no matter how painful” just before telling the painful truth to the Italian-American community about their bogus hero.

Please note: She had to inflict this pain because she loves them.

Well, who hasn’t benefited from tough love at some point in their lives? − usually when they were children. Missy had tears in her voice when she wondered aloud how different things might have been had the legendary adventurer arrived with “love in his heart.”

Her speech resembled an epic poem, delivered in a kind of hypnotic monotone that made it seem much longer than it actually was. Mishy spared us no details of Columbus’s routine atrocities and of the kind and gentle behavior of the people who became his victims. It was like she was right there, 530 years ago, shadowing him like an embedded news reporter who was granted special access by a clueless member of his team who had no idea how dangerous she was.

But let’s get back to the crux of the issue − the rock that almost nobody noticed until now and a patch of grass that was widely known as simply: The Delta.

The crusaders of social justice made it a point to notice that rock because when someone somewhere might be offended, no stone should be left unturned, or in this case, unseen. Once Mishy and her followers saw it, they couldn’t unsee it.

Social justice demands that the honorable city council rectify the moral error of honoring Columbus by scrubbing his name from the rock and from the patch of grass on which it sits. Instead, how about honoring the Indigenous people − the Pequossettes – who were displaced from the land that we now inhabit?

While Mishy’s wish might appear to be extremely divisive, you should try not see it that way. You should see it as being inclusive. That’s right – inclusive! Because once Watertowners take the time to educate themselves, they will clearly see that dumping Columbus will benefit the entire community by setting us free from a history of lies and thus enabling us to find our moral compass.

Yes, my friends, Watertown will become one big happy family once we all shed our ignorance and accept our shared guilt for the oppression that took place hundreds of years in the past by oppressors we never came close to meeting. Think of Mishy and her missionaries as angels, with love in their hearts, graciously guiding us toward the path of truth, justice, and enlightenment.

The trial came to a merciful end with a vote by the council.

As determined by a seven to two vote of the council members, a committee will be charged to further examine the issue and make a recommendation to the full council. Only two members were able to resist the popular temptation to jump aboard the pander wagon and tossed their political fortunes into the wind by voting no. Perhaps they were temporarily overcome by the inescapable smell of baloney.

It was just about a year ago when the Progressive Left commandeered the city council’s committee on public safety, consuming months of the committee’s time waging an all-out assault on the Watertown Police Department in the name of racial justice.

They came armed with charts, stats, and a strong sense of entitlement. They did not get their way with the committee, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be back for another try.

What I often hear from some of those crusaders is: What’s the harm?

If they get their way, they just might find a few Derek Chauvins hiding in the ranks of the WPD. And if they find nothing, at least they checked and we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief. No harm done. Unless, of course, you consider the potential demoralization of a young, dedicated, hardworking police department.

What’s the harm in taking up the time and attention of the city council with social justice causes that disturb the consciences of a small group of the morally enlightened but not of the average citizen?

I would suggest that the harm is a three-headed beast: distraction, overload, and false priorities.

The cultural hurricane set-off by the murder of George Floyd is now dying down. It triggered some good things and some not-so-good things. Urgently needed police reform began taking place across the country, including Watertown – where it was accepted (Thanks, Chief Lawn!) early and willingly. Some troubled cities acquiesced to demands to defund the police, then when violent crime skyrocketed, they couldn’t get their cops back.

If I am reading the winds correctly (and I think I am), the next cultural storm is steadily building in intensity. Its name is Uvalde.

The tragedy at Uvalde was completely preventable. Forget what didn’t happen on a national or state level regarding guns and mental health. It was preventable on a local level just as Parkland was preventable on a local level in 2018.

Parkland provided a textbook case (see this timeline) of municipal institutions failing the community they were charged to serve. Their government, their school district, and their law enforcement agencies each failed separately and failed together by their inability to perform as a synchronized unit when their community needed it most.

The writing of the Uvalde massacre textbook case is currently on-hold because after initially firing off false and conflicting information, federal, state, and county officials have retreated behind a wall of silence. The mayor and city council claim that they are being stonewalled just like everyone else.

What we already know is damning enough for all involved.

The dominating story is the one of police officers, from multiple agencies, waiting for over an hour before rushing the shooter. The number of children who could have been saved is currently unknown.

What is known is that those officers would have never been in that position, had it not been for inadequate security systems – not to excuse those officers.

Initial reports said that a school resource officer had engaged the shooter as the shooter was approaching the school. That report was soon proclaimed to be incorrect. There has since been no mention of a school resource officer’s presence on the scene. Was there a school resource officer who was negligently missing in action?

Before the shooter even entered the building, a school employee used the security app on his phone to trigger the school’s warning system. He hit a lockdown button that sent emergency emails and texts to co-workers. At least one teacher did not get the messages.

Security experts say that the system was less than optimal. A centralized alert system, featuring a panic button in each classroom, would have notified everyone at once without reliance on personal devices.

On that day, all of the door locking systems, including those on the outside doors and the classroom doors could only be locked from the outside. It has yet to be determined (or revealed) if this was intentional or if the system had malfunctioned.

When police officers first entered the building, they were not able to communicate by radio without leaving the building to get a signal. Border Patrol officers had radios that did work inside the building but just barely.

We more recently learned that a police officer had a brief moment to take-out the shooter before the shooter entered the building but decided not to take the shot for fear of hitting a bystander. Was that a good decision or a bad one? In hindsight, it appears to be a bad one.

Parkland went through their finger-pointing stage. Uvalde is now going through theirs and blame will be assigned accordingly when all the facts are in.

You might be thinking that Uvalde is obviously led by exceptionally inept people who were glaringly unaware of their most obvious security weaknesses and should not be considered at all typical. Or maybe because they are small (a population of about 16,000) and rural, they should be held to a lower standard.

We might also consider that with a median household income of only $42,000, the town could not afford first-class school security systems. Perhaps upgrades were on their to-do list but other projects took priority.

The suburban city of Parkland might be a better example. Parkland is 30 miles from Fort Lauderdale and 20 miles from Boca Raton and has a population of 34,000 (Watertown has 36,000) and a median household income of $160,000 (Watertown’s is $100,000). (All income numbers are from the 2020 census report.)

When the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, walked through a security gate outside of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School – a gate that was supposed be locked − he was immediately spotted by an unarmed adult security monitor, patrolling the grounds, who saw that he was carrying a rifle case.

It should be noted that this security monitor recognized Cruz as a former student at the high school, who was nicknamed “Crazy Boy” and had been widely referred to as the student “most likely to shoot up the school.”

The security monitor could have stopped him from entering the school. Or he could have used his radio to call a Code Red, which would have locked down the school and he could have called 911. He did none of the above. Instead he used his radio to call another security monitor who also did none of the above. Had either of them called a Code Red, all students and teachers would have been locked down in their classrooms.

Later the two men and other security monitors who were inside the school said that they didn’t know the protocol for calling a Code Red. Most of the victims were killed in either the hallways or the stairwells. A few were killed inside classrooms. Standing in the hallway, Cruz shot them through the door windows. 

All of the classrooms had safe corners, away from the classroom door windows where students could not be seen from the hallway. Unfortunately, most of the teachers used those safe corners to store furniture, making them inaccessible to those trying to hide.

The shooting set off the fire alarm sending students and teachers, who were unaware of the shooter’s presence, out into the hallways and stairwells. A Code Red would have kept them inside their locked classrooms.

The first 911 call had to be rerouted to the sheriff's office, wasting precious minutes, because the 911 system was not equipped to efficiently handle a call made from a cell phone.

The school had a video monitoring system that school administrators turned over to the police to help them locate the shooter. Unfortunately, they did not make it clear that the system was on a twenty-minute delay so the police didn’t realize they were using a delayed video to track down the shooter who by that time had left the building, totally unseen.

There is quite a bit more, including no one taking charge within police departments and no communication between police departments at both the Parkland and Uvalde crime scenes but I think you get the point.

In both Parkland and Uvalde, up until the massacres of their children, comprehensive school security was absent from the minds of their leaders. The Uvalde massacre marked the 27^th school shooting so far this year. In a post-Columbine, post-Newtown, and post-Parkland America, what explanation is there for so many guardians of the public trust to have been missing in action?

I think the answer is disturbingly simple. The “it can’t happen here” mentality creates a fool’s paradise.

Experts tell us that potential school shooters study the methods used by their predecessors, especially the methods of the two Columbine shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and that they look up to high-profile school shooters, who are either dead or in prison, as an elite fraternity of the alienated and rejected who decided to end their lives in a spectacular act of revenge.

As a rule, school mass-shooters do not discriminate on which children to shoot. Their delusional claim to fame and their imagined admittance into that elite fraternity is based on building a high body count. Every high-profile school massacre since Columbine has inspired copycats.

Municipal leaders should find this terrifying. Parents already do. And they should.

If history is to be our guide, eighteen-year-old Salvador Ramos who fatally shot nineteen children and two teachers and wounded seventeen others at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas is the new hero being studied and revered by a tiny but determined number of deranged adolescent boys who are considering ending their lives in their own spectacular act of revenge.

Failure to recognize that “it absolutely can happen here” starts with government – the representatives we elect and the officials they appoint. Distractions of their attention, overload of their time and effort, and their focus on false priorities make-up the three-headed beast that feeds on well-meaning municipal leaders.

What’s the harm in renaming the delta?

What’s the harm in imposing this burden, along with existing burdens, on a part-time and already overstretched city council for the purpose of having a highly controversial, highly divisive act of symbolic moral justice mandated by government?

In a fool’s paradise, harm always happens someplace else.

 

Bruce Coltin, The Battle for Watertown