Speaking at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, Sen. Kamala Harris announced that she would support a federal law to change Columbus Day to "Indigenous Peoples Day."  She told the crowd that "we are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country, and we have to be honest about that."

We can expect her view to quickly become mainstream in the Democratic Party, as the candidates attempt to outdo one another in appealing to the social justice warriors.  And while it would be easy to dismiss this as virtue-signaling, her remarks represent something much larger than merely changing the name of a holiday.

A nation's collective identity is rooted in a sense of shared history.  Destroying that shared history is the first step in radically transforming a society.

Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address spoke of "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living human heart and hearthstone all over this broad land."

Radio commentator Dennis Prager, in his book The Rational Bible, asked, "Who are we, if not our memories?"

He went on to add:

I once interviewed a man who, as the result of a fall on his head, had lost virtually all long-term memory.  He did not even remember who his wife and children were.  In the interview he acknowledged that, for all intents and purposes, because of his loss of memory, the man he had been had died.

The same holds true for nations.  Nations, too, are their memories.  A nation that doesn't remember its past, like the man who fell on his head, ceases to be the nation it was.

Columbus is the current target of the SJWs.  But recall the Confederate generals.  If we continue to judge historic figures by the standards of the present, rather than against the canvas of their own time, eventually, we will end up obliterating the Founders.  Bit by bit, America will be erased.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," wrote George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984.  Orwell intended the novel to be a warning against the imposition of totalitarianism, but modern progressives have embraced it as a political strategy to transform the culture.