so, if the confederate flag is a symbol of slavery
what single thing does the stars and stripes symbolize?
I'd guess different things for different folks
I watched cousins Bo and Luke Duke drive the General Lee almost every week, mostly looking for Daisy Duke (Catherine Bach)
I don't remember many references to slavery, but I was young and the world was a very different place in 1979.
I loved the Dukes of Hazzard, and the whole thing about the rebel flag on the car is dumb. It's the left going too far, as they've been guilty of a lot lately. The show was campy and harmless. If two young southerners named their car the General Lee, what the hell flag are they supposed to have on it??
But a fictional, campy show is one thing. A carved-into-stone permanent, public celebration of the leaders of the confederacy is very different. I didn't plan to feel icky when I saw it. I didn't know about it, so I had a sudden, honest reaction from within, and it was very negative. However, while my parents grew up very southern, I am not. I grew up in various urban areas of Florida. No accent, no pride for "the south".
I liked the show because the car in it could jump over anything - not because it was 'southern' or anything like that. Looking back, they would occasionally have some 'pride of 'the south" moments in it, but it was always light and passing. There wasn't anything deep, because that's not what the show was.
Stone Mountain is a unique place to visit just based on the geology - like the Grand Canyon or the caverns in NM or whatever. But pro-'the south' segregationists decided to carve 3 people into the side of the mountain - 3 guys who were technically traitors and attacked the U.S. Just by that angle, it's odd.