“Juneteenth”.
Yet another excuse for a three-day weekend, this time to celebrate the end of slavery in Texas. Note carefully: IN TEXAS. Not in the entire old Confederacy; the Emancipation Proclamation started that ball rolling on January 1, 1863, in all Confederate territories then held by the Union, and then followed Union troops as they reclaimed the rest of the South. Which to me means that if we’re going to celebrate the end of slavery, New Year’s Day is perfectly fine for that. Or if you’re a purist, September 22, 1862, was the date Lincoln issued the Proclamation.
Wikipedia (which of course should never be anyone’s go-to resource, but I’m in a hurry this morning) says of Juneteenth,
Celebrations date to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. It spread across the South and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival.
The date is literally the date of the arrival of occupying Union troops in Galveston, Texas, and the immediate application of the Emancipation Proclamation there. Wikipedia again:
On the morning of Monday, June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas, to take command of the more than 2,000 federal troops recently landed in the department of Texas to enforce the emancipation of its slaves and oversee a peaceful transition of power, additionally nullifying all laws passed within Texas during the war by Confederate lawmakers.
So there you have it. The only reason for this holiday’s existence is that it marks the official emancipation of slaves in the last state the Union occupied after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
Well, that, and as noted above, yet another excuse for a federal three-day weekend. I read yesterday this brings the number of paid days off for the average Federal employee to 44, which is nearly nine weeks. I wish I had nine weeks of paid days off. I suppose the only good thing about this is it’s nine weeks they’re not screwing around in our beknighted country’s affairs.
Face it, folks, I live in Indiana. We never had slaves, here. My mother’s family didn’t arrive here until long after the Civil War ended, and my father’s family never held slaves, from their arrival in New York and Pennsylvania in the 1700s through their migrations to western Pennsylvania, northern Ohio, and Indiana, and I feel no obligation to hand over so-called “reparations” to my middle-class black neighbors who never were slaves. I have trouble with this being enshrined as a national holiday.
And please note that I don’t have a problem with MLK Day, because Dr. King espoused a message of peace and harmony between the races.
Mark my words, Juneteenth will not be used for that — it will be used (and already has been, by the execrable Cori Bush, with Slow Joe’s signature fresh on the page) as yet another excuse to drive a wedge between Americans and to call for reparations for people who never were slaves from people who never held slaves.
The insanity will end when we finally decide we’ve had enough. Have we had enough, yet?