Juneteenth: The Great American Holiday
This holiday doesn't primarily focus on white people, so white people did not give Juneteenth its due this year.
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 slavery back? Those 14 votes are a humiliating legislative legacy for the House members who cast them that will endure through the annals of American history, forever immortalizing them as racists no matter how often they claim “I’m not racist, but…” followed by a certainly racist comment.
Let’s honor these House members’ racism here: Mo Brooks, Mike Rogers, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Tom McClintock, Doug LaMalfa, Andrew Clyde, Thomas Massie, Matt Rosendale, Ralph Norman, Scott DesJarlais, Ronny Jackson, Chip Roy, and Tom Tiffany.
It’s truly no surprise that many of them are MAGA all-stars, but all of them are pedantic morons who can’t help themselves but get emotionally incensed like pavlovian, Confederate-sympathizing freaks anytime they’re forced to mentally accept the fact that Black people are just as American as they are.
Maybe they’re just annoyed that they now have one more day like Martin Luther King Jr. Day to feel societally compelled to write out halfhearted public statements extolling the virtues of racial equality littered with superficial references to historical civil rights leaders who, if alive today, would without a doubt be yelled at by Republican members of Congress and Fox News pundits to “sit down and shut up” with the same stupid, prejudiced fury they aim at Black Lives Matter activists for merely asking police not to kill them, or Colin Kaepernick when he merely kneels during the National Anthem in the most passive, silent, unthreatening protest imaginable that would still qualify definitionally as a form of communication.
Juneteenth is win-win for everyone. It’s a day off work for some to celebrate or relax, and a day for service-economy businesses to make a ton of money, which means Juneteenth is just one more thing that centuries’ worth of abused and exploited slaves have done for the prosperity and comfort of America.
Juneteenth is a great holiday, and takes America a few steps further down the long arc of moral justice. It’s also a day to reflect that, though America is not perfect, its greatness lies in our continued efforts through history to live up to the ideals on which we pride ourselves.
Check out the links to my recent comedy pieces I’ve published on Medium:
Trump Has Been Asking Friends What Prison Is Like, “For A Friend”
“Jesus Was White” Say Evangelicals Who Don’t Know Geography, History, Or Genetics
Thanks for your eyeball attention!
-Dash MacIntyre
Follow me on Twitter at @HalfwayPost to interrupt your daily doomscrolling with graffiti news and Dada humor, and follow me on Medium to keep up with my daily writing studio.