"I think that getting rid of the statues will allow students to concentrate on studies instead of a bunch of old guys who died years ago."
History is a very important field of study. Without it, you don't know where you are, how you got there, or where you're going.
"I still don't get what the use of praising people who lost a war is about."
H. L. Mencken wrote, "The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."
"People born in the South cannot possible be jealous of the North winning still can they?"
Jealousy never entered into it.
"I don't see us shoving it in your faces ever."
I see people insisting that the war was about slavery only and nothing else, that all Southerners were the moral equivalent of Nazi death camp guards, and that all other reasons for the war are merely lying attempts to justify slavery.
It's untrue as well as insulting.
I might suggest that you study up on Lee some time. If a father were asked by his son what a man should be, he couldn't do better than pointing at Lee.
Sorry, but Mencken is here, as in a lot of what he wrote, just trying to offend the conventional wisdom.
Lincoln's entire point was that no "people," defined by him as the people of the United States, could remain long self-governing if any subgroup of that people could jump ship whenever they felt like it. As the Confederacy would probably have found out had they won. How long before further fissioning began? And how long will any people survive in a jungle world, if they constantly divide and subdivide?