Centering the Consistent But Also Consistently Unheralded Architects of US Democracy – July 4th to the 5th Saturday Night OT

 

Grand Opening Ceremony at the Obama Presidential Center

Iran is 7000 years old (with a 90% literacy rate)

Britain and Europe are also more than a few centuries old

America as a country is at best an adolescent by comparison

 

If the last is to mature into the thriving country envisioned by ALL of the founders, we the people have to learn about and confront the contradictions at its core  --

 

with the full understanding that those who are NOT invested in the anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation that ALL those founders intended will try – and have tried – to keep the whole of the truth from us.

I try to learn new things every Juneteeth weekend and every July 4^th and 5^th weekend – and TIL

that Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration included a clause repudiating slavery that was struck out of the final draft, because

- South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue both the practice and the national and international trafficking of enslaved people, and

 - Northern signers wanted the practice to continue because their industries benefited from it – both of these things underscoring what I’ve read Joy Reid refer to as “America’s addiction to cheap labor”.

Also I learned

 that the colonizers’ 27^th and final grievance against the British Empire complained of excitation of insurrectionists in specific reference to an offer made by the British governor of Virginia promising freedom to any enslaved person who escaped their Patriot masters and took up arms for Britain … which they framed as a “domestic insurrection” that unified the Union by uniting Northern & Southern colonies against what they perceived as the terrifying threat of slave rebellions   (which is kind of the opposite of anyone or any institution pushing the myth of “happy slaves” would have us know … which is why in the current U.S. education system you have to seek out extracurricular sources to learn about Nat Turner or anyone else organizing a rebellion in these United States).

10 Black Businesses White America Tried to Shut Down in the 90s

I further submit the repeated destruction of Black-built-businesses BY THE BOOTSTRAPS (and drowning of towns) the liars keep bleating about is evidence of their unspoken intent to do their damndest to keep a permanent underclass – for the economic reason of unlimited greed --  that the country’s original documents with their original grievances & deliberate omissions also ostensibly intended …

BEFORE THEY WERE AMENDED IN ORDER TO PERMIT THE COUNTRY TO MATURE INTO A FULL NATION WITH A FULL MULTICULTURAL DEMOCRATIC CITIZENRY.

 

THAT is what the current iteration of Confederates would like the country to regress to, and

THAT is why they seek so relentlessly to destroy the Reconstruction Amendments, which were drafted and moved forward by ALL Americans of ALL colors in order to fulfill the nation’s full and matured promise.

 

Justice Jackson in her Trump v Barbera concurrence (the very first EO signed after the 2024 fauxlection was an unconstitutional attempt to repeal birthright citizenship) spoke of the freed Blacks who refused to self-deport after the 1860 Civil War and instead “started organizing toward the creation of the kind of Nation the colonizationalists opposed – one that guaranteed freedom and justice for all”

 

Ali Velshi has a presentation heroes of democracy a lot of the country hasn't been taught about

Rachel interviews Professor Sherrilyn Ifill after her own history lesson here

Forget the Founders. Celebrate the Enslaved Black People Who Escaped on the 4th of July.

a breath

Have you ever traveled to another city or country just to see a concert? Where?

Some scenes never stop being funny. Which movie or TV moment gets you laughing every single time, even if you've seen it a hundred times?