By Stephen Witt, Los Angeles County Politics
Call it coincidence, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech in Greece this week, just days before Indigenous Peoples’ Day, proves the new political catchphrase: two things can be true at the same time.
Rubio delivered his address Wednesday on the historic Pnyx hill, with the Parthenon as his highly symbolic backdrop, tracing the roots of American democracy directly to ancient Greece.
“The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our Constitution was born – Philadelphia – is itself a Greek name,” said Rubio.
He went on to credit Athens with giving the world democracy, and Plato and Aristotle with giving it Western philosophy, shaping the ideas of law, citizenship and republican government that guided America’s founders.
Rubio warned that the West stands at a crossroads, facing decline if it does not act, and took aim at open borders, outsourced manufacturing and underfunded militaries.
I share his pride in those ideals. Western civilization has given the world a great deal, and its best values deserve to stay front and center.
Rubio also credited the Greek hunger for knowledge with inspiring the great voyages that followed.
“The hunger for new knowledge, that’s what gave birth to Magellan’s first expedition around the world, to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11’s journey to the moon,” he said.
And yet on Monday, Angelenos will mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which Los Angeles adopted in 2017 in place of Columbus Day. The City Council sided with activists who view the explorer as a symbol of the destruction of native peoples in the Americas.
There is no getting around this truth either. European colonial powers, mainly Spain, Portugal, England and France, and later the United States under the banner of Manifest Destiny, wiped out or decimated entire tribes of native peoples, along with their histories. Honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day is only fitting and proper.
So, can two truths be true at the same time, where both find honor, and we take the good and the bad of what we’ve done as a civilization?
Los Angeles may already be showing the way. This week, the Board of Supervisors proclaimed October Italian American Heritage Month, the same month the county honors Indigenous peoples. For many Italian Americans, Columbus Day was never about conquest, but a celebration of immigrants who once faced discrimination of their own. Neither honor cancels the other. A community proud of its heritage can still mourn what that heritage cost others, and a people who suffered that cost can still be honored in full.
That’s how I’d reconcile it: celebrate the triumphs without erasing the tragedies, and tell the whole story, not half of it.
