Day 4,078—Juneteenth 2025!—

 

I started my run slightly earlier than yesterday, and I was up a little after 5! It blows my mind how bright and hot it is a little after 6 a.m. A woman who I passed when I was running said something like, “I don’t know how you’re running in this!” Part of me felt like it was easier to run it in now compared to how it was going to be later in the day, but the humidity was still intense. I was thinking about Juneteenth more and wondering why I hadn’t heard of the day before it was first nationally recognized not that many years ago. But at the same time why the Civil War was always something I remember covering in school; I remember almost nothing about reconstruction and what happened to all the enslaved people. It is amazing how I will now hear adults talk about how the enslaved people didn’t get the news about the end of the Civil War because “news traveled slower back then.” The reality is that slaveholders and Texas refused to follow the federal law, and no one in the state was enforcing the law, so it took the federal army to free the slaves in Texas. Many people in Texas dispute this basic objective history, but it is nothing new. When people are confronted with uncomfortable truths, they try to change them as opposed to changing their way of thinking. Which has gotten a great resurgence recently with the federal government stripping away anything from federal websites that appear “critical of the U.S.”  What bothers me is how little attention is paid to the vile way that reconstruction was handled, basically taking away land from the slave owners only to return it to them, and forcing the previously enslaved people to work there! But who is to blame when most children in the country are provided with false narratives and with little reason to question what they’re being taught by adults that they trust?