Many Southerners feel this is not a flag of treason, but one of defiance. They feel they are the true victims. The North forced the war on the South, a peace-loving godly people who just wanted to keep their superior way of life. They did the only thing a noble people could do and resisted. Until I was 18, that's what I believed--and was taught in school. Slavery? What slavery?
That's just plain sad. Those beliefs are fueling the attack on DEI and it's not going to end well for anyone. Thanks for speaking up, Jon.
I recall very little of what I was taught in school, just that the United States had been at war with itself and the North won. I remember nothing about slavery.
My first introduction to the topic of slavery was watching Gone With the Wind. The dresses and opulence of Tara were a smokescreen to the atrocities of the enslaved. The closest the moviemakers came was when an elderly Mammy complained of a “misery in my back.”
When the U.S. Government is paying for children’s education they get to decide what’s taught. Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen is an excellent exposé on the school textbook industry’s rewriting of American history.
Remnants of the Confederacy belong in a museum, IMHO.