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Juneteenth: The Great American Holiday
Imagine being one of the 14 House Republicans who voted against its adoption
The resentment some conservatives feel about Juneteenth becoming a Federal holiday is farcical because the end of slavery is such a spectacularly patriotic thing to celebrate.
It was a revolution that extended the Declaration of Independence and its promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to Black Americans after a morally shameful eighty-nine year delay thanks to the Southern colonies’ lazy plantation owners who wouldn’t agree to ratify the Constitution unless they could continue being evil and undeservedly rich without doing any work.
What a great moment in American freedom for all according to the existential ideal that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Juneteenth is also a much more meaningful, culturally sincere holiday than Columbus Day or Washington’s Birthday posing as “President’s Day.”
Imagine being one of the 14 House Republicans who voted against its adoption, a minuscule minority even in their own party. Talk about embarrassing to go on record claiming that the acknowledgement of the end of slavery is somehow “divisive.”
Divisive for who? Antebellum slaveowners? The white supremacist Nazis today who secretly want…
