One: Poverty teaches you to emphasize what you have, ideally. Wealth teaches you to value what you don’t. Obviously, poverty often just makes people miserable, but very few Americans would know this, since almost none of us are going hungry, crapping in holes in the ground, unable to find safe water poor. But still, I think lowering expectations often works, and that children in very poor countries still laugh loudly, and their parents still love them very much.
Two: You cannot forgive on behalf of other people. People who were IN the Holocaust–who were interned or displaced or who lost friends and family, homes and places–can forgive the Nazis. People who were not, cannot. This in my view is why the Left is so unforgiving: almost NO ONE who is “fighting for” some cause or people, is fighting for their OWN cause. It is white people “fighting” for black people, rich people “fighting” for poor people.
Three: Juneteenth is not about empowering blacks. It is about attacking whites. It celebrates a day on which black people were released FROM white people, BY other white people. They did not contribute to their own liberation in any meaningful way, and were the more or less passive recipients of it. What this holiday does do is remind people that slavery was once practiced in this country, as it has been (and often still is) in much of the rest of the world.
Here is the thing: a great many current white Americans have ancestors on both sides of their family tree who came over after 1865. Moreover, slaves were only owned in the South, and only by the richest 1% or so. We also had 14 fewer States.
This makes the likelihood that ANY particular white person even has ANCESTORS that owned slaves vanishingly unlikely, and even then someone alive today cannot be expected to bear any moral responsibility for something that ended 150 years ago.
You know whose family owned slaves? Kamala Harris family, or so I read. But no one will ever care, will they?
And I will emphasize that these lockdowns and lockouts hurt the black community, of all groups, arguably the worse. About a third of all small businesses went under overall, but some 40% of black owned businesses went under.
What fucking good, in that world, does a new holiday do? None. It exists for propaganda and indoctrination purposes.