Happy Juneteenth to you, where ever you are. I could offer you an explanation of Juneteenth, with nary a card to be found in your neighborhood Hallmark store, but there's a lot of unresolved sorrow, fear, anguish and anger associated with the origins and causes for the system of oppression whose end, in the United States as we knew it then, Juneteenth helps mark. It was on June 19, 1865, when slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned that the War Between the States had ended and that they were now free.
In the here (and hear) and now, basically lasting all day today (a day later than is historically accurate but it's Saturday and what doesn't celebrate better on Saturdays, right?) at the Marina at Norwich Harbor across from Louis Brown Park, will be quite-the-do. And large fun has been a part of these annual celebrations in Norwich for the 20 years that the Norwich NAACP has sponsored them.
In a sense, holiday celebrations help bring different people, and peoples, together, to reflect on who they are, who they were and who they are on the way to becoming. Ideally, each of us sees in one another a reflection of ourselves as well as a better understanding of our unique talents and gifts-the stuff that makes you, you and me, me. That's why the Juneteenth party at the Norwich Marina is so large--not only all the people who are going to be there are at it, but all those who've come before them and those generations as yet to be born who will fulfill their promises and who will dream their own dreams and then live those as well.
So celebrate with us here in Norwich or where ever in the world you find yourself today.Sometimes, unless and until you look back it's hard to see how far you've traveled. It can be easy to realize the journey has a distance yet to accomplished, and to feel daunted by the challenge of that task, but it is sweeter and sweetened by the knowledge of where we were and where we are now. "And if my thought dreams could be seen, They'd probably put my head in a guillotine. But it's alright, Ma, it's life and life only."
-bill kenny
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