Happy Juneteenth Day

Today is Independence Day.

No, not July 4th, but the day when Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

I heard someone say this morning that this is a day to be celebrated by African Americans. No argument from me there, of course. But I don't think it's a day to be celebrated exclusively. After all, when any American citizen is imprisoned unjustly or enslaved, it is bad for America as a whole. And we all benefit from the fact that slaves were "freed" upon this day more than a century ago.

If only slavery had not happened at all. But it did. Sadly, horrifyingly, it did.

And here we are, more than 14 decades later, still with the Ku Klux Klan, with people arguing that people of color don't matter and perhaps shouldn't have the vote, with people still believing they need to fear someone darker than they are.

When I was a child, during the time of the race riots, I was sure that by the time I was at this stage of my adulthood, we would largely, as a country, be blind to race. But we're anything but blind to race.

Then again, as a child when the feminist movement was starting, I was sure people would stop paying attention to gender. Now, here we are in the new millennium, with a White House power base led by people who occasionally remark that it's a shame women got the right to vote, that women are somehow less, that women should stay home and care for their families, that microscopic embryos have more rights than their mothers, that women don't belong in positions of power.