Columbus Day: Will The REAL Mary Moe Please Stand Up?
Editors note: the following comments originally appeared on Facebook and in the Great Falls Tribune in early October, 2017 – prior to the Great Falls municipal election. Subsequently Ms. Moe has been elected to the City Commission. We are publishing the letter here as a prelude to a follow-up piece coming soon. Stay tuned.
Like many Italian Americans I will be recognizing Columbus Day as a way to take pride in my Italian heritage. Great Falls far left City Commission candidate Moe seeks to eliminate the celebration of Christopher Columbus the Italian explorer, who was first honored in America in 1792.
In her Montana Cowgirl blog piece of Feb 15, 2017 she referred to Columbus as “not a hero, but a brutal maniac”.
(http://mtcowgirl.com/2017/02/15/whitewash/)
Candidate Moe, who supported MT HB 322 which would have eliminated Columbus day in Montana, should be singing the Sam Cooke song “Don’t know much about History”.
The more relevant issue than Moe’s knowledge of history is whether she can represent the people of Great Falls with her far left views.
We know how she feels about Columbus, but how does she feel about the fact that Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, held slaves, or St Patrick who mistreated the Druids. Will she vote to eliminate the statues of Lewis and Clark and the celebration of St Patrick’s Day in Great Falls? After all fair is fair.
We should take off Moe’s mask hiding her liberal record after Halloween by voting for the candidates who can represent Great Falls values.
Philip Faccenda – Proud First Generation Italian American
Um, Phil, you do realize I’m sure that one of the largest lynchings in this country was of Italian immigrants down south, right? In fact, Italians were lynched wholesale at times. So, according to your logic, we should celebrate those lynchings. Sorry, but it’s not a liberal/conservative issue, but simply a moral one. I’m not Italian, but my people from my region sailed with Columbus because they were they best sailors at the time. The crews were not all Italian, but simply made up of good sailors. And Columbus was indeed a mass murderer unworthy of any praise. There are plenty of other Italians to be proud of. Me, personally, I would not honor this one as representative of my race. My own race, Croatian, committed one of the worst genocides of WWII. In fact, it was so bad the nazis told them to tone it down because they were making all nazis look bad. True story. I could never celebrate that genocide. Just couldn’t do it.
P.s. There is a great movie about the New Orleans lynching of the eleven Italian men. It’s called Vendetta. I would love to loan my copy to anyone interested. (VHS) It’s well worth a watch if you’re unfamiliar with that incident.
[…] the same time, the same text appeared in the Tribune as a letter to the editor. On December 7, I reposted it on E-City Beat. Four days later, I followed up with yet another post, […]