Some of us actually want to study and better understand the past. The “folklore” your talking about were carefully calculated lies meant to bolster white supremacy. The Lost Cause mythology wasn’t built in folkways, generally, it was built by powerful people and it was meant to hide the truth of the civil war and its cause. Period.
And hiding that by celebrating the confederacy only makes us smaller and more ignorant.
That is very reductive, and I suspect you know that. The people you accuse of wishing to “tear down” the US, are simply seeking to give a fuller, more accurate picture of the past that doesn’t whitewash it.
What about Berlin, Dublin, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Tokyo, or any number of other wonderful places to live? Our options here aren’t just the US and hell. Many of us don’t WANT to leave, we want to have a better US. We are not getting that right now and plenty of people are feeling like this is a much less safe place to be. For some people, it’s never been a safe place to be.
Who brutalized and murdered people and received no condemnation from the most powerful person on earth for it. That’s a real problem.
It doesn’t take a majority. It takes enough people who don’t care and won’t listen, and an active minority willing to usurp power for their own agenda. The economic right has crawled in bed with the white supremacists. They have money and power, which the anti-fascists and BLM does not have. The “regular people” (whoever the fuck that is) don’t generally see it as an ongoing steady problem, but as a flare of a problem. Most “regular people” think like you, that it’s not widespread, or something to be concerned over. A few bad apples you say. A few bad apples got a white supremacist sympathizer elected to the most powerful position on earth. He can launch a thousand nukes within a few minutes.
I think you are seriously underestimating the threat we’re all under here. You and yours might not be on the front lines of this, and you might not feel the threat directly, but it’s there. We have to nip it in the bud now, or we’re all screwed - no more America kind of screwed.
