For some nitwits, this is a controversial holiday.
You (may) get a day off work. There are cookouts and parades, fireworks and celebrations -- and you're complaining?
Try this on for size: In 1776, representatives of what would become the United States of America signed their names to a document that proclaimed "All men are created equal..." Eleven years later, they wrote up and signed another one that would become the foundational law of the new country. To keep the new country from flying apart, the U. S. Constitution compromised: some men were going to be more equal than others. 75 years later, that compromise resulted in a calamitous civil war and once it was over (and well over, the 15th wasn't ratified until 1870), at least on the paper of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, all citizens were equal before the law.
Depending on where you lived, who your ancestors were and just how much effort you made to exercise your rights, those rights were still not protected by anything much stronger than the paper they were written on. It was nearly a hundred more years before that pot boiled over.
The promise of the Declaration of Independence is still not perfectly fulfilled. Perhaps it will never be; perhaps it's an ideal, a dream. Maybe the best we can ever hope for is to keep working towards it -- and that's a worthy goal.
When a day is set aside to mark one of the biggest milestones on that road, the official end of slavery in these United States, it takes a pretty small heart to resent it.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
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I consider both the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence aspirational documents.
Being populated by humans, the USA will probably never fully achieve the goals laid out by those documents. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying.
And at least we have goals more oriented to the rights of the citizenry than to the power of the State. Which is more than a lot of countries in the world have.
Slavery was not ended on June 19th. That may be a day some folks in Texas heard of the end of the war, and that is debatable, the telegraph did exist.
We could use January first, the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, or the date the 13th Amendment was ratified — December 6th if we want to celebrate the end of slavery.
If we want to celebrate a June 19th great. But that day did not mark the end of slavery. Facts, as you often say, are important.
Joe,
I wrote, "a day...set aside to mark one of the biggest milestones." Did I claim that was the day slavery ended? I did not. Has anything but the quickest child's-edition thumbnail description made that claim for the date? Not that I have seen.
Facts matter. But if we're going to be strict constructionists, the Fourth of July probably should be celebrated on July 2nd.
Stringing together the holidays, a patriotic American would run up the flag on Flag Day (14 June), with or without fireworks; take a Sunday for Dear Old Dad; enjoy the parades, cookouts, celebrations, illuminations etc, on or near the 19th while putting up even more red, white and blue bunting; enjoy a couple of weeks of being a happy American and cap it with a grand finale on Independence day with picnics, reading the Declaration of Independence aloud and even more fireworks, hooray!
Or you could join the creeps who grouse about it 'cos some dark-skinned folks get a day to be happy in there, happy that their ancestors got out from under being livestock, and the creeps don't want to be happy about that right next to them.
I have received a number of far more irate comments, including one who lectured me, "...those dumb SOBs have enough holidays already." But we're an entire country of "dumb SOBs (and Bs)," and we should take all the celebrating we can get. America started out as a long-odds bet, a made-up country that fell well short of its grandest aims, and we've managed, however painfully, to bootstrap our way ever closer to the promises of our founding. It's a remarkable achievement.
“When a day is set aside to mark one of the biggest milestones on that road, the official end of slavery in these United States,”
Perhaps I interpreted this statement incorrectly, if so I apologize. I guess my beef was the part you did not mention in your response. the “official end...” part.
I have no issue with the Juneteenth holiday, only the misrepresentation of it.
I'm mystified. Slavery officially ended. The day of celebration marks that end -- not necessarily the anniversary.
Why is Memorial Day the last Monday in May? What significant battle or treaty does that spot on the calendar mark?
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