Today is Juneteenth, which celebrates the day that the Union army emancipated all of the slaves in Texas back in 1865. As the whitest man on the planet, it doesn't really affect my life too much; I don't attend any parties or have a special pair of Juneteenth suspenders that I wear. However, I think it's a cool holiday. If there's one day worth celebrating, I think this day's a good one; they could even rename it to "The Day that a Majority of the Population Stopped Being Complete and Total Bastards". No matter how controversial a stance this is, I am and will remain firmly in the anti-slavery camp. (Note: this only applies to one human enslaving another. I firmly support humanity's right to enslave animals, aliens, nature in general, robots, and most inanimate objects.)
Now, to my little Juneteenth anecdote. As I've established several hundred times, I live in Texas, and most of the time, I think our state gets a bad wrap. If your opinion were based solely on movies and television, you'd think we settle parking tickets with shoot-outs, wear earplugs to muffle the jangling of all of our spurs, and clad ourselves in rawhide ponchos in case we get sprayed by one of those frequent gushing oil wells. Of course, all of this is ridiculous; I'd only wear a leather poncho at the behest of an armed lunatic and only if he agreed not to photograph me. Another popular idea of Texas is that we're all racists. I don't want to believe this, but my fellow residents aren't doing us any favors.
Growing up, it didn't seem to me like the people of Texas were particularly racist. My immediate family was full of maniacs, and as a result, we were tolerant of all kinds of stuff. But other people weren't necessarily, and it's from this group that I learned about Juneteenth. I remember back many years ago, I was a little kid, listening to some adults talk. For whatever reason, the topic of Juneteenth came up. I still didn't know what it was. The adults were just jabbering back and forth about it, and I recall one woman there saying, "I remember when Juneteenth rolled around a couple of years ago. I was pregnant at the time. I worried that I'd go into labor on that day, and I prayed it wouldn't happen. I just couldn't handle having a child with a birthday on that date." And then she used some other, unsavory terms and the conversation shifted to another topic.
As I said, I had no idea what the holiday was. Based on what my esteemed elder said, I assumed it was some terrible day, and that perhaps dragons swooped down from the sky, bit old people in half, and spit their bones on the Constitution. Later that night, though, I asked around and found out what it actually was. The truth disturbed me. I already knew about slavery and everything, but it shocked me to learn that there were people around me, lots apparently, who construe a day like that as a negative, horrible thing, a day on which you'd be ashamed to have a child. Man. Maaaaaaan. Maaaaaaaaaaaaaan. Do what now? I felt like writing Chuck Norris a letter, asking him to move Walker, Texas Ranger to a less horrible state and please, if he could, take me with him.
As usual, I have no conclusion here. Texas is full of crazy people, just like any other state. Some of these crazy people bottle their urine and throw it at the trash man because they think he's the devil, while others hate people of different races. Just because there's no hurled urine involved, it doesn't make their beliefs any less crazy. Juneteenth, Goulash salutes you.
Posted by Cody at June 19, 2006 5:28 PM