Confederates in the Attic

Is confederates in the attic real? I did not grow up in the south so the whole idea of reenacting and celebrating a war is strange to me. Even living in the south for almost five years, I still have yet to experience that tradition. Other than the fact that the war has been over for about one hundred and fifty years, I don’t understand why someone how has been to war, been shot up, and hates war still feels that the civil war is not over. I can understand that most of the war was fought on southern soil and that makes it a bit closer to home, but Gettysburg happened in Pennsylvania and people up north don’t reenact it.
I feel like the article put a great deal of emphasis on the civil war being about slavery when it initially wasn’t. It seems odd to me that someone who knows a bit about the civil war does not mention that at all. With all the emphasis on slavery, it seemed ironic to me that in Virginia they tried to celebrate Lee’s and Jackson’s birthday with Martin Luther King’s birthday.
There is also one part that confuses me. There is a sentence when the minister is preaching and mentions that he never learned about black heroes and calls Booker T. Washington the peanut man. I don’t know if he is using that as an example for not being taught about it or not, because they are not the same people. Either way it was interesting to me to see how interested people can be with their personal past and how where they live affects that.