Thoughtful Juneteenth

No Kings. No slaves.

Driving to Gulfport, Mississippi, in the early eighties, I passed Beau Voir, the home of Jefferson Davis. I was curious, so I stopped at this shabby antebellum green (as I recall) home that faced The Gulf of Mexico. It was a museum of ‘The Lost Cause’ wherein genteel old women, Daughters of the Confederacy, sat in the dusty hall in their rocking chairs tatting lace. I don’t recall the memorabilia. It was all quaint. I went on my way.

Some time after Katrina ravaged the gulf coast, I was again passing Beau Voir. Gambling had come to Mississippi in the years since my last visit. Now the shabby mansion had perked up and it was adorned with an equestrian statue, a marble (as I recall) wall and a sign announcing the Jeffersonn Davis Memorial Library. “Ahhh”, sez I, “the war ain’t over. The South will rise again.” I was not shocked…just discouraged.

Today is not a holiday universally loved by Americans. It is clearly not a MAGA celebration. We are not in ‘post-racial’ America, the one that people imagined when we elected an intelligent black politician who led some of us to believe that the war was over. I was led to wish,, but I enjoyed the illusion for a while.

Now we have a body politic that is so openly racist that a female bigot has received a small fortune via GoFundMe in defense of her right to use racial epithets and to whine about HER safety. The white christian nationalist secretary of defense (I only capitalize legitimate concepts) is more concerned with replacing the names on military bases to their original (and shameful) confederate officer designations than he is about the situation in the Middle East. Citizens of color are being jailed and exiled without due process. Why? Why?

The ‘master race’ does not like competition. They are threatened by achievements of the formerly enslaved and the immigrants. Anti-semitism, also formerly grumbling along on the down low, is flourishing. MAGA=Nazi. The American Civil War has morphed into the American culture wars and now into a totalitarian regime. Sig Heil? or “Let There Be Peace on Earth And Let It Begin With Me.?’

Thank you, President Lincoln. Happy Juneteenth.