Jubilation

 Most Americans, more than half of them anyway, know little or nothing at all about Juneteenth. This news comes to us via a new Gallup poll about America's trendiest holiday. Discovering that only forty percent of those polled felt they knew "a lot" or "some" about the celebration of the end of slavery in the United States doesn't quite hit the surprising mark on my outrage scale. The fact that I encountered three jokes on Twitter within moments of the news that Congress had passed legislation making it a federal holiday about how they couldn't wait for the big Juneteenth Mattress Event, that stuck in my craw. Mostly because someone else beat me to it. 

So, besides great deals on box springs and mattresses, what should the average American expect from this new adoption? Hopefully an infusion of knowledge about the country in which they live. Like the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation, while being a very impressive document, did not come about during a time when there was a twenty-four hour news cycle or Al Gore's Internet. It took time for news, even joyous news like the abolition of slavery, to travel to all those dark corners of our wobbly new nation. It took three years for Union soldiers to get down to Galveston, Texas to inform black and white folks that slavery wasn't a thing anymore. 

Feel free at this point to conjecture about how many of those white folks might have known before that but were just pretending that they hadn't heard until somebody showed up in a uniform to make it official. 

Please also feel free to wonder why it took one hundred sixty more years to officially adopt this occasion as a federal holiday. The way we all carry on about Cinco De Mayo when it isn't even our own independence we're celebrating makes me curious why there hasn't been more of a marketing push before this. 

It wouldn't have anything to do with a thread of systematic racism that continues to run through the history of these United States, would it? Could it? 

For now, let's appreciate this step forward in the painstakingly awkward stumble toward doing the right thing. Take some time to learn a few things about Juneteenth and the events surrounding it. You might even consider learning the names of the fourteen Republican representatives who voted against the holiday. The ones who voted against celebrating freedom. And getting a really great deal on a mattress.