Reference: Johns Hopkins Founder Owned Slaves, Disrupting Belief He Was An Abolitionist : NPR
Researchers apparently working for Johns Hopkins University as part of a perhaps suicidal university-led project on the school’s history have – shock and surprise – allegedly found “evidence” that Mr. Hopkins owned slaves:
“Historians for Johns Hopkins University discovered that the founder of the Baltimore-based school owned slaves, contrary to the long-held belief that the wealthy philanthropist was a staunch abolitionist.”
It’s probably only a matter of time until Mr. Hopkins is cancelled and his name consigned to the dustbin of history by the baying woke crowd. Wonder what they’ll call the school now? Woke U? Looking at the “evidence” presented however, it certainly seems far from overwhelming. And there is also evidence that he once bought a slave for the sole purpose of freeing him. What an evil man! But even just having walked past a slave on the street two hundred years ago is more than enough “evidence” to cancel anyone these days. Well, people going digging for trouble are more than likely to find it. Presumably the university will take some idiotic appeasing action to appease the jackals. We have two words to say about appeasement: Neville Chamberlain. Look up how it worked out for him.
Anyway, to all of this we say, so what? This identity politics cencellation business has gotten way far out of hand. Someone who generations ago allegedly owned a slave, or may have had “racist” views, or thought a woman’s place was in the kitchen or that queers were, well, queer – these all have to completely cancelled. It just doesn’t matter what they did with the rest of their lives, what they achieved, who they helped or didn’t, what they built; that one thing is enough to ruin them.
Who among us is so pure they could stand to have their entire life minutely examined by these woke morons? Did you kick a dog once when you were a kid? Did you push your cat off the dining room table? Did you call someone a “bitch” (or worse) once? Did you get drunk or high once and do something stupid? Would you want every stupid or vicious or evil thing you ever thought or said or did, or view you had, plastered all over the internet so people can chase you down and try to ruin you? Isn’t every single one of us a mix of good and bad, the proportion being the only variable. Do we all want to be entirely defined by just one thing or one thought or one action? Or even two, or three, or four? And just who decides? Do you want some woke snot-nosed college kid who never had to pay a bill in his life or have a job and knows nothing whatever but what his “progressive” college professors have filled his wooden head with, making those decisions? Not us.
Wasn’t it Jesus himself who said those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Or even more eloquently:
“[N]ever send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. John Donne, Meditation XVII (1623)(popularly and typically misquoted as “ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”). Think about it.