To the Editor:

These days not too much that is done or said by a 16 year-old causes shock in this reader. I have only to open the daily papers or flip on the evening news and see the escalating violence that plagues our great city's streets to become a bit more jaded and callous to the actions of our youth. While that sense of shock has previously been reserved for the wanton acts of mayhem, it was the comments from the young and obviously intelligent Mr. Holmes which sent shivers down my spine and caused me to toss last weeks Reporter down in utter disbelief.

While the well articulated and well meaning words of Mr. Holmes seemed aimed at the lack of substance and truth in today's public school history curriculum, calling Christopher Columbus a "murderer" and mentally "sick" as well as saying that the Pilgrims were "killers" is utter nonsense and speaks to the degree that revisionist historians have been able to inculcate our public school system with politically correct rubbish and warped pseudo-intellectual drivel.

Sure, we can look back with the luxury of hindsight and say that the courageous explorers of the 15th, 16th, and 17th century were insensitive to the people they encountered and committed atrocities that would make us blanch today, but that is what hindsight allows us in the present, the here and now, to do. While we may not agree with the methods and tactics they used to conquer the new lands and the people inhabiting them, we surely can recognize that they lived in much different times from our own. Times that called for men to hold to their convictions and set out on the voyages of exploration that opened up the New World and its wondrous people, lands and resources to the old.

These men didn't come from a world of "touchy feely" diplomacy. There was no United Nations. No foreign policy think tanks. They came from a world of subjugate or be subjugated, kill or be killed. Even with that, I've not found any scrap of evidence to say that Columbus was a "murderer" who suffered from some form of insanity. Those who followed in the centuries after Columbus may well be categorized as brutalizing conquerors who sought to deepen the coffers of the European powers through subjugation, exploitation and colonization, but then again, for better or worse that was their world.

Evidently, with these young and talented minds like Mr. Holmes being spoon fed such revisionist cow dung, we can all be rest assured that the editorial pages found in the likes of The Globe and The New York Times will not be wanting for far left leaning propagandists in the future. A future I have been given more reason to weep for.

George M. Greene, Harbor View St.