Well, I'm all for telling both sides of the story, but I would hate to see this wave of politically enlightened thinking succeed in denigrating the word "discover". To cite that it always includes the point of view of the discoverer is belabouring the obvious. The bleeding heart who went overboard in this TFTD quote has collapsed successful exploration and pathetically inept human relations and made a single enemy of the two.

And it should probably be taken into account that within the context of the culture, doing what Columbus did was pretty ballsy. And it was genuine discovery from the European perspective, since the Vikings weren't talking.

To use human compassion to reduce our drive to fond the new, to improve situations, to use ingenuity to solve problems relating to survival, would be a serious disservice. It cannot be gainsaid that we have been cruel and selfcentered as a culture and as a species, but wringing our hands and condemning discovery is not a viable remedy.

A