Today is Juneteenth Day. I could offer you an explanation of the origins and history of the day, but this does the trick nicely. However, for us in Norwich, unlike many urban areas across the country in recent years, we have a more relaxed approach to the day and the events surrounding it.
But it's not all celebrations. There's unresolved sorrow, fear, resentment, anguish, and anger associated with the origins and causes of the system of oppression whose end, in the United States as we knew it came back then one-hundred and sixty years ago on June 19 when slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned the War Between the States had ended months earlier on 9 April and they were now free.
Juneteenth is a federal holiday, as well it should be, and a celebration of who we are and who we choose to be as a citizenry at an especially fraught moment in our history and heritage. 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 (or should) a reflection of ourselves as well as a better understanding of our unique talents and gifts; the things that make you, you and me, me. That's why Juneteenth celebrations here in Norwich are 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 wherever 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 be 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.
-bill kenny
-bill kenny
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