Juneteenth

 

I posted this photo about a year ago, back when the "second wave" of the covids was just starting to swell in Georgia, Trump was still president, America was in the midst of sometimes peaceful, sometimes not, protests over police violence and extra-judicial murders, and no one seemed to really know how long any of this would last or how it would all resolve. This picture of near-empty Atlanta streets seems to me to capture the loneliness and sense of despair of that harrowing moment in history.

If you had told me then that a year later, we would have an official toll of more than 600,000 deaths, but also a new president who enabled us all to get vaccinated, and that we would be celebrating a new federal holiday, the Juneteenth Day of Observance, that honors American freedom on the anniversary of the day in 1865 that enslaved Americans in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free, I would not have dared to hope you were telling the truth.

And yet, here we are. 

As Heather Cox Richardson notes (this post is modeled after one of hers), it feels like we have lived a whole century in the past year.