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June the 19th 1865 is the day the freedom loving Texans were, at the end of a rifle, forced to free the people that they had enslaved, the final state of the traitorous Confederacy to do so. It was not the end of slavery in the United States that would come officially later the same year, but it was a vital and important step along the long rocky road to freedom. A road we still stumble down.

This is a day of celebration as it was the date that the United States Army freed the enslaved peoples of Texas partially validate the great principals upon which this nation is founded. It is also the day to remember the horrific hundreds of years of nightmarish torment our nation visited up a subjugated population. Like an element in a state of quantum state that is simultaneously wave and particle America’s history is both pride and shame.

That the founders of this nation expressed all too human hypocrisy does not negate the amazing ideal that ‘all men are created equal’ nor does that bold septimate absolve them of their evils. The inspiring belief that freedom and equality are due to all people has unleashed a forced unlike any other on this planet and the failures to live up to those aspirations is a source of shame but also a motivation to do better.

Far too many people only want to think of history in one mode or another. That the centuries of slavery are an original and inescapable sin upon everything this nation has achieved, or that the evils of the past are dead and bear no relevance today. Both extremes are wrong headed.  It is the wave and particle duality again. It is both things and it is neither thing. It is the history that we must celebrate and the shame we must never forget.