We Loved Our Generals

I don't think I can really top the hilarity of the last post of proposed ice cream flavors for The Dumbass in Chief so I won't even try, instead I'll tell a little tale about wars that never seem to die.
I was born and raised in Virgina, a fact I bring up so often my friends from Texas even tell me I'm a little nutty with state pride and that's saying something. For the entire 13 years of my public education in the Old Dominion we had a holiday that fell the third Monday of January called "Lee-Jackson-King Day". It was on all my school calendars and official school documentation and I never thought it was odd and had no idea it was called anything else in other places. I thought the whole nation celebrated Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr on the same day, like they celebrated both Lincoln and Washington on the same day in February.
It wasn't until my freshman year of college in New York that I very publicly found out the truth about other states. Since we didn't have classes that day several of my friends and I stayed together at a big house off campus and then got up early to go cross-country skiing. They were standing in the kitchen, all 12 of them, when I slid into the room in my socks and yelled "HAPPY LEE-JACKSON-KING DAY EVERYBODY!!!" to a suddenly silent room of Yankees.
"What?"they asked.
I repeated my salutation, though noticeably it was less emphatic than the first.
"What is that?" they asked.
I told them about the great holiday for Generals Lee and Jackson and Dr. King.
Their faces were all frozen in a stunned grimace.
"You mean to tell us that you celebrate two slave owning, Confederate Generals and an assassinated Civil Rights leader on the same day?"
"I never thought about it that way...but...yeah. We do. What, is that weird?"

(note: Virginia has been celebrating Lee-Jackson Day since 1904, as they are both rather revered Sons of the Commonwealth. When Reagan made MLK a national holiday in 1983, Virginia decided to tack on the existing holiday to the national one and managed to ignore the irony of it all until 2000, when they finally split the holidays again. Today is Lee-Jackson Day in Virginia; the Friday before MLK Day.)