Juneteenth:

My best friend Mark and I had a discussion last night about Juneteenth. Mark and I generally agree on most matters even if we see things from a different perspective. I’m a sixty something white guy, he’s a sixty something black guy. We’ve lived in the same country, through the same times, and seen the world through completely different eyes.

I oppose the federal holiday, for many reasons. Mark pointed out the painful irony of being a black man enslaved as the nation celebrated “Independence Day,” and in many ways this is is more than 150 years past due, and it is. I’m opposed to another holiday that has its meaning and significance lost, in the words of Nat King Cole, in “Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, days of soda and pretzels and beer…”

Juneteenth should be a day of somber acknowledgment of this nations history of racial hate toward all non-white, non-European people. Trail of Tears to Tulsa, to Emmett Till to the young man shot dead in his car, reaching for his wallet.

Juneteenth for me should be a day of rage in the face of the cowardly Nazis who think denying another citizen human being’s right to a goddamn bottle of water while standing in line to vote is somehow ok.