Forgiveness has atrophied in recent years as we pick ap♛art the sins lying dormant in🍒 others’ closets while never examining our own.
Our society’s self-anointed holds judgment over others, not to encourage mea🥃ningful change but to inflict pain and seize power.
The infallible few have rebranded forgiveness, once a virtue, as an act of weakness and an attempt to conceal sinners’ act🐲ions.
They want us to believe fo𒊎rgiving abhorrent behavior means agreeing with it or minimizing its impact: This is simply not true.
On Juneteenth, short for 💛June nineteenth, we are reminded of our nation’s greatest sin of slavery and its end after federal troops arrived in Ga🦩lveston, Texas, in 1865 to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation.
The Biden administration made ඣJuneteenth a federal holiday in 202♕1 for Americans to recognize a moment in history we moved in the direction of freedom for all.
As Americans, we ce🌳le��brate liberty and independence from tyranny, and that’s what Juneteenth is all about.
Although slavery was a worldwide p🍰henomenon, America’s ambition was to devi☂ate from the norm in pursuit of freedom.
If we’re not all fre﷽e, then none of us really is; we can’t have a truly free nation with tyranny for some.
J🍌u🥂neteenth is a celebration of our nation’s moral compass moving —🅺 toward behaving more righteously and attempting to beco♓me a more perfect union.
But there are pe⭕ople who want to perpetuate only one version ♏of America as they stare into the past with a simplistic interpretation that satisfies their present-day narratives.
The modern progressive wants you to🌺 believe nothing has changed, racial progress is an illusion, and wanting to pursue forgiveness is white supꦇremacy.
Take Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 🐽New York Tim✤es 1619 Project.
“White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can🎐 never forget,” she insists.
Hannah-Jones and her ilk preach pessimism to entrench the Amerꦍican mind in racial nihilism, so we can only see the world in the worst possible light.
To her, the sum of our nation is a one-sided equation totaling the horrors we committed wꦉithout the positives we’ve produced.
Progressives see Juneteenth as a way t🦄o guilt Americans about what we were rather than admiring what we came from.
Politic𒈔ians and the upper class politicize the celebration of the last freedmen and freedwomen in our union, bastardizing our moment of jubilation in pursuit of their own pow🍎er.
And as a reflex, their opponents discard this celebr෴ation 🉐of triumph because the people who promote it differ from them politically.
Some of them despise Joe Bi꧋den so much that anything with his stamp of approval gets their automatic disa༺pproval.
Juneteenth shouldn’t havಌe any political mo⛎tivations or interpretations attached to it — that weaponizes a m🌺omentous time in history to drive a wedge between us all.
It forces people to take a side for or against it rather than understanding that Juneteenth is for us all.
The point of understanding history i🃏s to have humility about the human condition.
It’s♋ pos💖sible that actions from the past can happen again, and they often do repeat themselves.
If we learned from history, we’d realize the people who weaponize the past to inflict pain or imply gu💙ilt by the association against people in the present often become the tyrants of the future.
If we are to move forward as a nation, we shouldn’t remain shameful of past activities we had no part — but we can remain🎃 vigilant to never repeat those mistakes.
We can celebrate the moments when we course-corrected and appreciate how faᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚr we’v🃏e come.
And we can forgive flawed men because we’re just a🔯s capable of barbarism, and refusing to forgive fosters the same hatred we condemn♉ in people from the past.
Our forgiveness muscle may have atrophied, but it’s not too late to rehabilitate it. G🍸ive it a try this Juneteenth.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.
