by Gare on Sun Feb 14, 2010 6:37 am
I declare February to be National Reality Check Month!
Why not? It's the season where if you get enough people together, you can lobby to make your own government. Heck, if you have enough emotional pull and money to buy air time, you can create a Tea Party and petition Marvel Comics not to let Captain America fight it; I'm rooting for a National Three-Cornered Paper Hat Party who wants to anoint Neil Armstrong as a Latter-Day Saint...because why not?
President's Day (alternate spelling is "Presidents Day" because certain political groups eschew apostrophes and other grammatically correct punctuations) seems like a keystone date to commence National Reality Check Month. From its start in 1971 when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was passed, we gave up a little piece of American History for Three-Day Weekends. It's tidy, less bookkeeping, avoids singling out your favorite President to remember.
I'm offering just a little counterpoint here to this month's 3-day weekend: George Washington's Birthday—as many of us observed it in school—is February 22nd, and this federal holiday was enacted by the United States Congress in 1880. The federal holiday has since been shifted to the third Monday in February and renamed, although several States have opted to keep the original name.
Now that Honest Abe shares this national holiday, let's remember that he was born on February 12, 1809. The earliest known observance of Lincoln's birthday occurred in Buffalo, New York, in 1874. Julius Francis made it his life's mission to honor the slain president. He repeatedly petitioned Congress to establish Lincoln's birthday as a legal holiday. There has never been an annual Federal holiday honoring Lincoln, so I guess President(')s Day will have to do.
Unreal,
-g-
