Only in the media. Down at the cross roads, foot up on the truck bumper, history, old and new, will not be forgotten. Runs in my veins...so to speak.
Sadly, turns out that you don't have to fool all of the people all of the time, only enough of them, often enough.
What is happening to this nation's culture is terrifying. It is worse than erasing our history, it is rewriting it with a very deliberate political agenda in mind.
Slavery cannot be justified. Not even in historical context can it be justified as evidenced by the thoughtful, introspective, and self-condemning words of some 18th century slave holders. But it is a part of history, and not just US history. Slavery was legally permitted and enforced for a lot longer under the Stars and Stripes than it was under the Stars & Bars.
And while slavery was the ever present under-current that justified the kind of cultural divisions between North and South we typically now think of as existing between different primitive tribes, it wasn't the primary cause of anything. It was the most tangible, obvious symbol of the differences between two cultures.
A US historian opined that if one wants to know what and who the USA is, one has to understand the War Between the States, because that war is what made us the nation we are today: for both good and ill. It was a defining moment, a cross roads for the nation and cultures.
It has also been said that those who control history, control the future.
Between the uncomfortable, subtle nature of our history (of all history) on the one hand and those with overt desires to shape public opinion to their desired political ends, no surprise then that the real history of the War Between the States isn't much taught in public schools.
Due to a strange convergence of religion, geography, and history, the area of Utah in which I was raised has been known as "Utah's Dixie" since the first Mormon settlers arrived in the late 1850s. The (then single) high school and college both bore the name Dixie. And the Battle Standard flew quite freely. There was never any history of slavery, nor even notable racism in the area. Being a "rebel" in Southern Utah was never about slavery, racism, or oppression, but rather about resisting and overcoming the oppression dished out by others.
No doubt we had a, simplified, glamorized and sanitized cultural view of things, much as so many today have an overly simplified negative view of all things southern. But it did instill in me a desire to understand the history, truly.
Four years living in Boston did more to help me understand the War from an emotional perspective than all the books I read.
Too much rambling and reminiscing for my old home town and culture, neither of which much exist today. I guess my point is, we do the best we can with our own children. But when 95%+ of children attend public schools ever more under the control of DC, and staffed with teachers from liberal controlled teaching colleges, it is rough going.
I've heard it said that one reason some hate the 2nd amendment and RKBA is because guns are like a great funnel moving through the social/political space. That funnel scoops all kinds of different people--hunters, preppers, self-defense, home schoolers, conspiracy theorists, libertarians, conservatives, even some liberals, etc, etc, etc--and brings them together in ways that nothing else would. Guns are the thread that bind otherwise disparate groups together in opposition to totalitarian government control of society.
How exactly a psychotic, murderous rampage in a black church turns into a need to ban from public display the confederate battle standard is fascinating. Terrifying, but fascinating.
Charles