Why do you want it to be alien spacecraft? Are you some sort of glutton for punishment?
It's not the pathogens people object to, so much as the slavery and genocide. Particularly, celebrating the originator and perpetrator of those crimes on the land where they were perpetrated.
By all means, write about Christopher Columbus in the history books (after Leif Erikson, who unlike Columbus actually set foot in America) but let's stop normalizing erecting statues to villains.
Yes, but we don't. We don't create statues of Christopher Columbus to place his actions in their proper historical context, or to memorialize his victims, any more than we do the Holocaust with statues of Hitler. We erect statues of Columbus because until relatively recently the entirely Eurocentric narrative about him considered him a heroic figure, and the subjugation of indigenous peoples a righteous and noble cause.
I think that’s more the norm with people, if they even think about Columbus at all.
The problem with contemporary dialogue is the refusal to allow for grey zones, for nuanced and balanced viewpoints. Who is this “we” that you project upon? Do you consider that this presumption and projection may by symptomatic of a neuroticism unique to a overly loud illiberal subculture in the US? I do, it’s all that gives me faith in the survival of the greater whole.
No. I consider that not everyone in the US is completely culturally detached from the legacy of colonialism, and that some people have perfectly valid reasons to object to statues of people like Columbus.
You seem to understand the negative impacts of colonialism on an intellectual level, as a simple fact of history, but you also seem perplexed as to why anyone would care. Perhaps you should consider why someone would object to a statue of Columbus. Engage with the nuance you're referring to, by not dismissing those with views other than yours as being carriers of a social disease. Examine your own views and ask yourself why you consider it valid to keep a Columbus statue up to celebrate some of his accomplishments, but not to remove it as a statement of opposition to his other accomplishments.