06/19/2026
Happy Juneteenth!
I hope you enjoy this recent photo from the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park where a horrible fire swept through five years ago. The landscape is slowly healing as the sun and the rain work together to encourage new growth.
I know that many of you who follow my posts are white, and it might be easy to see Juneteenth as a holiday meant primarily for the Black community. But this isn’t just a Black holiday, it’s an American one. It marks a turning point in our history when we began, however imperfectly, to live up to the ideals we claim to cherish: that all people are created equal.
Slavery was a profound injustice and millions of human beings were stolen from their homelands and forced to live as property under a system that denied their basic humanity. Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people in Texas were finally told of their freedom, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
For the Black community, it has long been a day of remembrance and celebration, but it should be a celebration for all of us. Juneteenth doesn’t just mark the liberation of some, it marks the beginning of our collective liberation from one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s story.
It’s a day to honor the resilience of those who endured and to reckon with our past. Many want to push these things under the carpet, but we all know that it is only the light which brings healing and allows us to move on from it.
I'm always inspired by my German friends. They don't deny the Holocaust and what their nation did, but instead they teach it in their schools and have remembrance statues everywhere so that it should never happen again. It is only by keeping such things in the light that healing can take place. I hope that this nation will have the courage to continue to keep these ugly things visible so we can continue to grow towards ever greater health.
