(7 minutes) 

The reversion of America to a country where racial hatred and separation  is a central theme of one American party has really helped to highlight the importance of a holiday like Juneteenth in the country’s calendar. 

To say the very least, slavery was an extremely bad idea to begin with. Since the landing of the first boatloads of white humans in the so called “New World” race has been at the core of our history, from the stealing of lands from the Native Americans to the use of enslaved Africans to create wealth for a few, race has been integral to the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Even though slavery ended officially in 1863 and then revealed to most people in June of 1865 in reality racial hatred and suppression has had been in full vigor since the end of slavery. Many of us in our lifetimes we have seen tremendous strides toward the ending of racism in this country.

Unfortunately for every major step forward there have been some major reactionary steps backwards. The last decade in particular has seen such backward reactionary steps. At a time when America elected a young man as its first black president, certain segments of society reacted by cranking up the hateful rhetoric and activities. 

Racism was at the core of the Donald Trump campaign in 2016. Racism is one of the many -isms at the core of the book banning crusades and the hyper-control of what teachers teach in the classrooms across America. 

Where once it looked like we were about ready to reach a turning point on race, reactionaries turned the tide back once more.

One great hope for the future is that much of the racism seems to be within the older generations. They won’t last much longer, folks. Poll after poll shows that millennial and GenZ folks are not buying into the segmentation of our society. They actually believe that “all men are created equal.”

One of the great things about bad ideas is that at some point they die out – it may take a long time but as Martin Luther King stated so eloquently “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

Juneteenth is a holiday that fits well between Memorial Day and Independence Day. Many have described it as America’s second Independence Day. That makes a lot of sense. Let’s do what we can to make that statement become reality.