Amnesia and the battle flag
In Germany, it is illegal to own, let alone display, a Nazi flag or any other symbols of the murderous Third Reich. In America, it is quite legal to own and often to display a Confederate "battle flag," even though that flag represents a period in history and a mentality that ought to be as repugnant to Americans as Hitler is to today's Germans.
You know the "battle flag" I'm talking about. The so-called Stars and Bars, the X-flag, the flag that has come to represent the Southern "cause" in the American Civil War. That cause, no matter what anybody tries to tell you, was defense of black slavery. Southern troops fought for the right to hold auctions in which screaming black children were separated for all time from their parents, for the right to whip black slaves to keep them picking cotton in the hot sun, for the right to track them with dogs and kill them if they tried to escape. That is the "Southern heritage" the Confederate battle flag represents.
Trample that flag in the dirt. Burn it. But do not allow students at Dauphin County Technical School in suburban Harrisburg or any other school display it on their cars or persons.
America often suffers from historical amnesia. We find it easier to pay lip service to the idea of "free expression" than to confront dark periods in our past that still color the present. Germany had the good sense after World War II to understand that wiping out Nazism would be far more difficult than simply changing the government. Even utter defeat in war was not enough to kill the virus. Nazis had to be removed from government, from schools, from courts, from businesses, from all aspects of the nation's life. And were, by and large, although it took years. The German student movement in the 1960s and 1970s completed the work.
We didn't do that in the South after the Civil War. The Reconstruction was as badly mismanaged then as the occupation of Iraq is today. The leaders of the South who lit the fire that led to four years of bloody civil war largely got off scot-free. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized free blacks and their white supporters.
Americans are understandably reluctant to ban even the most offensive of political speech. The students who display the battle flag are often merely ill-educated, dumb if you will. They are more likely looking for a way to proclaim their independence than to proclaim support for the demonic evil of the Confederacy. But the symbol is offensive to blacks and most whites alike. If we ever want to have a hope of wiping out that moral stain, the battle flag needs to go.