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First of all, if this isn't copypasta, big respect for typing this out.
I sense a lot of fucked up things in your story. Like your teacher, turning war, slavery and suffering into a game. Your dad, giving up on explaining the implications of hanging the flag in the house. Your highschool encouraging a cultish behavior... The physical piece of cloth was just an artefact cought up in the middle.
While I understand the power of symbols, and their ability to subconciously influence people, by burning the symbols we don't solve the underlying problems. We just hide them.
Meanwhile, violent extremists are still among us, and are able to unite under the picture of a frog, or an italian hand gesture...
The statues shouldn't be just left alone. They should be put into a proper context, so they become a memento, instead of a shrine.
I actually did type it out. Fell asleep a many times and dropped my phone on my face a couple of times.
So I wanna clarify some things:
As for the artifact just being caught in the middle and why we should preserve these statues and such, I used to feel the same way. In fact, you'll probably find in my unhealthily extensive comment history my idea that we should put all racist American symbols into museums called "History of fucked up things white people have done," and then make admission free for minorities but charge for white people to attend. All proceeds would go to reparations.
But just one problem: just like how statues provide legitimacy, putting statues into museums provide even more legitimacy. Unfortunately, assholes are gonna asshole and they'll take their kids to these museums to teach them about their proud heritage of supporting systemic racism.
If you wanna preserve something, take pictures before you burn the statues, then pictures during. Make a short documentary about why it was such a shitty fucking thing to make these statues in the first place (most of them are shockingly new, like only 50-60 years old or so. Statues seem so eternal, so people forget that they can be made with the worst of intentions, such as protesting civil rights.), and then feature images of the people who seem most upset about the monuments being destroyed.
If someone values a statue more than exposing the racist-ass people who decided to fund making the statue, they're also unlikely to care about the harm the statue actively does to people.
Just for the sake of argument, a thought experiment: Let's say that I commission a statue of Kenneth Pinyan and have it placed in a family-friendly park or near a historical landmark.
I make sure there's a nice plaque to memorialize Kenneth: He was a Boeing engineer and a bit of a revolutionary. While he and the scores of people who supported his ideas might now be seen as taboo, he stood up for what he believed was right and it was perfectly legal to do so. Ultimately, he died in action supporting his cause, but documentaries exist showing his encounters and one even won awards for showing how misunderstood his story was. Because of his conquests, a law was made with him in mind and that law now protects scores of people.
Now, consider that Kenneth Pinyan was also known as Mr. Hands and died from injuries he sustained being filmed fucking a horse. His death brought attention to the fact that beastiality was accidentally made legal in Washington state and a law was almost immediately passed making beastiality a class c felony.