Your question is rhetorical and can only have one answer: no serious person can find pride in a colonialist project, assuming you don’t have hate for a people, and you don’t have class interest i.e. are benefiting off the murders yourself. It’s a good point though because it shows exactly the point of contention: the question is not to be proud of the settler-colonial reality of the US.
Instead, consider this: do you live in present day US? do you want to build socialism here? Do you believe socialism will help our people? Socialism would by definition destroy the imperial projects of the US abroad, so wouldn’t that also help people the world over?
Think of the people living in present day US, the people who have been wronged by capitalism, racial injustice, for generations and generations since slavery, since the colonial expansion of the US, year after year, for the profits and power of the ruling imperialist bourgeoisie. How many lives have been lost, how many ways have we been wronged and abused? How many imperialist wars were forced onto the world by a handful of oligarchs?
If this reality fills you with a sense of justice and love for the people, the real working people here and the people of the world, if this fills you with a sense of duty and responsibility to take over the Empire for humanity’s sake, then not only are you in accordance with a inevitable reality: socialism will win, but you are, by the strict definition of the word, being patriotic.
What is often done in these conversations is to take the bourgeoisie’s lies as the only reality: if you love your neighbors, you will support the destruction of Libya. There is division in this world, you have to take a side, but it’s not us vs the thieves and murders on Wall St and in DC, it’s the Asians and Muslims and that’s why we had to bomb them. You live paycheck to paycheck, cannot pay medical bills, have no power in the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, but you have all these “freedoms” and that’s why they hate America.
These are all lies and we cannot let them confuse us. We do love our people, but not the bourgeoisie. We do have to take a side, but it’s our side, the working people, immigrant or not. We are patriotic, but it’s not for the imperialist and settler colonialist state (which are realities, no one denies this) that the bourgeoisie wants us to think is good for us, but we are patriotic for the socialist future we will build together as the people of present day America. We do want freedom, but it’s not the bourgeoisie’s definition of freedom, it’s power to the people.
In a way, it’s about what do you mean by “America”, the people or the capitalist settler colonial state? What do you mean by patriotic, loving the people and being in service of them or supporting the imperialist war machine? To reason in good faith, we must realize each side is referring to different things. When you point out the murderous history and present of the USA, you are not blaming the working class or shunning their revolutionary spirit. In the same way, when you say a better socialist world is possible, you are not denying the worst of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism.
On the point of symbols, each person can have their own personal opinion and feelings about them, like the flag for example.
However, the only thing that will determine what will happen moving forward is the American people as they seize a (future) revolutionary moment. We can have symbols and flags for the parties, for your socialist groups, but only the people of a socialist country will decide what works for them.
In that sense, we cannot preemptively design what the flag will look like. We cannot preemptively tell working class people they should burn the flag, or get used to a new one. Only once American socialism has gained power will symbols be defined and used. Until then, anything else is playing pretend.
It is for that reason that there is no point in centering what we do to the current imperial flag. Why talk to people about symbols if there’s no broad political or class consciousness yet about what the symbols are even supposed to represent? What’s the point of declaring to the world that you hate the flag because it represents imperialism without first having everyone listening be convinced of anti-imperialism? An analogy: Why scold people for liking a luxury brand or buying a product (a personal act) if they aren’t already against monopolies and capitalist materialism (a class analysis)?
At this stage, with no communist power, our priorities need to be class consciousness and analysis of power structures, not symbols of class and state or personal feelings (yet)