I learned the messy, unfiltered history of an imperfect country—one built on a Constitution that has kept it going and evolving for nearly 250 years.

That same Constitution, which originally allowed slavery, also provided the legal framework to end it and later secure civil rights. In the early 20th century, it was amended to guarantee women the right to vote.

I was never taught that the U.S. was always a just and noble nation, nor that the founders were infallible. But I also wasn’t taught that the country was irredeemable.

Our best feature has always been our willingness to redeem ourselves by continually remaking ourselves rather tethering ourselves to our past wrongs. The fact that our constitution has multiple provisions for doing exactly this has always been its most impressive feature.

A society that can’t learn and accept the good and the bad of its history is a society doomed to stagnation -- morally, intellectually, and economically.

Well for me personally it's because of empathy. The United States, as you rightly point out, was founded on slavery and genocide. I agree with you, and I would also add that the US is responsible for the deaths of millions globally in the past century (let's take Iraq and Vietnam, and I think you're already over a million). Generally a force for evil.

But a nation's citizens are not responsible for the actions of its government. They do not deserve to lose their homes in forest fires, have their children attend school hungry, go bankrupt on account of having cancer, be steeped in lifelong debt just to afford an education, lose their child in a school shooting, et cetera. What Elon Musk is doing will make those things much worse. That's why people are upset.