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Humans are remarkable creatures, capable of sublime visions and acts of beauty... Yet, we are also capable of perverse cruelty, such as believing we can own the body of another (when we do not even own ours), and worse, treating others less than human —when they, too, embody the Divine.  

Today is Juneteenth —it’s, finally, a national holiday—celebrating the end of slavery in the United States. On June 19, 1865, notice of the Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved people finally reached Texas through an order read aloud by Union General Gordon Grange in Galveston. This, despite the fact that Abraham Lincoln’s initial draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was 2 and a half years, earlier...
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And, of course, we still do not live in a post-racial society or world and that is a great part of our collective suffering.  When we imprison another person in mind, body or soul, we imprison ourselves.  The jailer is never free, since we are One.

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*The tyrant is only the slave turned inside out.*

Egyptian saying

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*Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.*

Anton Chekhov
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A ‘larger than life’, 700-pound statue of George Floyd was unveiled in New Jersey in honor of this historic day. 

[Juneteenth is also called Jubilee Day or Liberation Day, the date is when Union troops brought news of the Emancipation Proclamation to enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, declaring all people held in slavery must be freed.]

*George Floyd represents a lot more than himself at this juncture in history,* Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka said during a ceremony, when the statue was unveiled.

*The statue was to cause them to remember why they marched during such a horrific pandemic and I didn’t want them to go back to a status quo,*
said filmmaker Leon Pickney, who commissioned the statue.

The sculptor, Stanley Watts, said:

*The world needed a peaceful George,* Watts said. *The world needed him relaxed and chilling on a bench and that’s what we produced and we produced him larger than life, because after death, George will be remembered. That’s what memorials are. To remember and never forget why we 
changed today and tomorrow and for the rest of our existence on this planet.*
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existence on this planet.”