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I don’t care and neither should you.

If it takes two or three (or more) “Greats” in your family tree to find someone in your ancestry who owned slaves in the US, it’s not news. Plain and simple. It’s just sensationalizing a current topic of emotion, one of which has no bearing on today.

Yesterday, a politician who is running for president admitted that both he and his wife’s ancestors owned slaves. This after, apparently, he was going to be “outted” by a media outlet for this piece of history. He’s not the only person to do this since this is now the hobby of bored media researchers who need something to make a sensational headline.

There is no news here.

Is this person responsible for what his ancestors did? No. Is he responsible for anything that happened before him, no matter how far back? No. So why are we even remotely interested? Your past doesn’t define you, or me. My past doesn’t define me, or you. So quit living like it does and quit blaming others like it does.

I don’t know if my past includes slave owners. I don’t know, since I have German heritage, if my past involves the persecution of Jews. Quite frankly, I don’t care if it does.

I am not that person and I am certainly not doing those things today.

We should be judging people based on their actions today. We should be judging how they treat people today.

We should be learning from our past, but not living in it. We can’t make the past better. We can’t change it. We shouldn’t make reparations for it. We shouldn’t scrub it clean just because it is offensive.

If you care about such things from the past, enough to get yourself all lathered up about it, then you are the problem because you are living in the past. It shouldn’t be an excuse for lack of trying to improve yourself. That’s the only person you can be responsible.

So, you ain’t woke. You are just focused on the wrong person.