The town fathers of Palo Alto have outdone themselves this time.
Here in my town, as with most of America, the public schools are named after public figures of note. All across the country, you’ve got your Washington High, your Lincoln Middle School, Churchill Elementary, and so forth. In Palo Alto, a couple of schools have been named after David Starr Jordan and Fred Terman. They’ve had these names for decades, ever since they were opened.
Well, when political correctness and social justice warriors were at their peak a couple of years ago, some people came upon the fact that Jordan and Terman had, during their time about a century ago, been advocates of eugenics. In their era, many scholars and men of good will openly discussed the idea of improving the human condition by promoting reproduction among “desirables” as opposed to, say, the retards that hang out in the ZeroHedge comments section.
In any case, Terman Middle School is named after the son of Fred Terman, and that son:
(a) had nothing to do with supporting eugenics at all
(b) is widely considered the father of the Silicon Valley, which, last time I checked, has created trillions of dollars of wealth on the planet
Anyway, Palo Alto’s virtue-signaling bureaucrats just HAD to change the name (actually multiple school names, but we’re focused on Terman here), even though the person in question had absolutely nothing to do with the “offensive” acts of his father a hundred years ago.
So they spent a ton of money on consultants and hundreds of hours of debates, and the replacement name they landed on was…………Yamamoto.
Now, as with Mr. Terman, this Yamamoto chap didn’t do anything wrong, but he has the same surname as the Japanese Admiral in World War 2 who, among other atrocities, ordered the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It would be sort of like having a local hero named Benjamin Hitler and naming an elementary school after him, even though the name is – – I dunno – – kind of tainted.
The irony to this whole thing is that, over the decades, the number of kids who went to Terman Middle School and had any fucking clue who Fred Terman was (much less gave a crap) is, I suspect, a whole integer less than 1. And yet by causing all this uproar, Palo Alto’s feckless leadership has spent all this time and money renaming the place, unwittingly, after a senior leader of an empire that killed and tortured millions of people to death.
Government. If you ever want something done wrong, you know where to turn.
