Vanessa thanks for posting.
It is good that you can still use an image of that flag to talk about these things, is it not.
I too think it is probably one of the prettiest flags that ever existed also.
I wish there was some way to be gentle, to tell you that you might be deluding yourself about your own deepest reasons for wishing to sacrifice it.
Way I see it;
You have been brainwashed, all of your life.
We all have, maybe especially you, with an active gaslighting program which, unfortunately, is still going on.
Google “The mis-education of the Negro”, if you doubt it, read the original paper, and see if you recognise by experience, any of the techniques described there.
We are all participating in it still, all of us, of all colours, who live “Rich” to anyone else, all of the time.
If you think that what you learned about the US civil war at school was the truth, think about this:
The issue of slavery in the US was far more complex than has become fashionable to believe, because it came from the UK, we were still meddling with it long after we claimed to have abolished it, and we’ve since done an amazing job of whitewashing it.
Try Googling “The T71 files” if you doubt that.
Will you still feel like the confederates were such an evil force, relative to the union, when you find that many of those who fought on the winning side had slaves too?
In the end people kill each other for profit, even if that profit is only the saving of their own lives, not to free others from slavery.
The full extent of UK history only came out recently, and most of the middle classes and upwards here are doing all they can to avoid admitting they have any part in an ongoing legacy of greed driven slavery.
So at the moment we are ripping down statues, changing street names, building names, and etc, driven by mainstream media reaction to the outrageous killing of George Floyd, just like you.
Lots of little sacrifices, all of the things we missed in the whitewashing, up until now.
What is it we really want to cover up?
Guilt.
Guilt over greed.
Greed that we continue to live by.
Slavery was highly profitable. How can there be anything more profitable than free human labour?
Imagine how much wealth was actually generated, by millions of lives given in labour, never mind how much was taken in the form of resources.
The inequality created at that time is easy to defend, from it being taken back.
What drives the urge to profit more and more, to collect taxes from expats making new livings in colonies, on what they “Owned”, including slaves?
What drives the urge in the first place, to go to a foreign land, to declare it, and its inhabitants our property, to do with whatever we please, brutalising them to such an extent they go along with it, submitting their entire lives?
Greed.
What is it that drives us as Engineers and Scientists, to wish to declare an idea we’ve come across as exclusively our very own property, despite everything we know, all of our knowledge, actually being built on that of others? (I am a historical patentee).
Greed.
What drives us to wish to believe that all of our individual portion of wealth, gained in societies built from the ground up on the forced free labour and resources of people from other countries, was earned by us alone?
Greed.
What is it that makes us think that when we give someone something, it is reasonable to expect more back in return?
Greed.
Why do we want to cover it up?
Guilt.
Because we are still doing it, and we want to continue doing it.
That is the real Systemic Problem at play, the real thing driving us to destruction as a species
We all have a part to play in fixing it.
Obviously it is a massive job.
But the good news is, maybe we can rescue the pretty Confederate flag.
