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Welcome to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes illustrated with stories from history,

current events and literature to help you be better at what you do.

And at the beginning of the week we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoke, intention for the week,

something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing.

So let's get into it.

Today the United States celebrates June 10th, the commemoration of the emancipation of slaves in America, 157 years ago,

two years after President Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, and nearly 90 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence,

US Army troops deployed to Texas, the only state of the Confederacy still with institutional slavery.

The people of Texas are informed, ordered a union general, in accordance with the proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.

There's no question that that military order deserves celebration.

It asserted absolute equality and began the liberation of hundreds of thousands of human beings.

And Marcus Aurelius would write in meditations that historic role models taught him to conceive of a society of equal laws governed by equality of statute and speech,

and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else.

It's as beautiful a sentence as any written by Thomas Jefferson, but of course, a long way from epictetus's personal experience.

This kind of freedom that Marcus was talking about would have been something inconceivable to the early stillcs who themselves lived in a slave society and tragically did very little to stop it.

Like Jefferson's writings, Marcus Aurelius' passage was just that, an idea, not a reality.

In 1910, theater Roosevelt would remind his fellow citizens of the critical distinction between words and deeds.

In name, we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he said, but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865.

And he said, words count for nothing except insofar as they represent acts. This is true everywhere.

Or as the Latin expression goes, act the nonverba, deeds not words.

It's wonderful to celebrate these principles from the Stoics and the Founders. It's wonderful to note the moments of historical progress like Juneteenth.

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