The Pledge of Allegiance

        

        I pledge allegiance to the flag…of the United States of America…

Is that something everyone should be forced to recite, even if the flag represents, say, despicable acts done by people working or fighting under that flag? For example, the repeated killing of innocent civilians by CIA-controlled drones in the Middle East, at My Lai in South Vietnam, No Gun Ri in South Korea, killing the original Americans during our westward expansion from the 17th to the 20^th centuries, or importing, enslaving, and mistreating millions of human beings forcibly taken from the African continent? Pledging allegiance suggests a ‘my country - right or wrong’ attitude implying that no matter what was done under that flag, it's okay; American exceptionalism means we'll gladly spill ours, or someone else's blood, for it regardless of what it may be.

If this is such a great country, (I think it is, but not because of the flag) why do we even need to pledge our allegiance to it? Wouldn't we simply love it or form a deep emotional attachment to the nation  - not because of a compulsory alliance?

Why not…”I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, a republic based on democracy, which offers liberty and justice for all…?

        That, to me anyway, makes far more sense than pledging allegiance to a piece of fabric. Because that is what it actually is demanding? Read it. It says “I pledge allegiance to the FLAG.”

The flag is several pieces of colored cloth sewn together. But that doesn't imbue it with any special power. It is no more the United States than the Statue of Liberty or singing Yankee Doodle. 

       Some advocates try to get around the flag pledge by claiming it follows the first line with …”and to the republic for which it stands…” But that follows the pledge to the FLAG; the “to the republic” business is an afterthought. It’s used as a stand-in for the sewn-together fabric banner. It’s one thing to align one’s self with an idea, or a nation. It’s quite another to an auxiliary imitation. The wisest thing I ever heard regarding the flag came from a retired World War Two Marine Corp Captain (Marshall Caitlin - who flew F4U’s over Bougainville and the Solomon Islands.) who said he “went to war to defend what America stood for, not what stood for America.”

        Nor do I think the word ‘indivisible’ should be part of that pledge. The Declaration of Independence clearly gives citizens of the states the right to break away or abolish the government if they feel it no longer represents them. Check the second paragraph of it if you doubt that. Clearly our Founding Fathers granted us the right to be divisible.

        People have forgotten how and why we even have a “Pledge of Allegiance.” The idea can be traced back to Daniel Sharp Ford, the owner of Youth’s Companion magazine. In 1892, he wanted to put American flags in every school in the country and sensed that the nation needed a dose of patriotism to heal the wounds from the American Civil War. So the sale of American flags was his initial the motivation. Sharp gave the assignment to write a patriotic pledge to a staff member, a former Baptist minister and Christian Socialist, Francis Bellamy. In Bellamy’s original Pledge, he expressed the egalitarian idealism of the French Revolution. He also drew on the socialist Utopian novels of his cousin Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward and Equality. The pledge was also written to honor the 400^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus setting foot in the New World. Most today do not recognize Bellamy’s original Pledge.

Bellamy originally included 'equality, fraternity' after liberty.

        Bellamy organized a school program around a flag raising ceremony including a special gesture called the Bellamy salute while saying his 'Pledge of Allegiance.' The salute consisted of each person extending their right arm straight forward, angling slightly upward, with fingers pointing directly ahead at the flag. Does it look familiar? 

Let me juxtapose it with a similar salute…

        Yes, the fascists and Nazis began using the same gesture less than 30 years later, but from the beginning, the act seemed exploitative and authoritarian, even before there was such a thing as fascism.

        In the 1923 and 1924 National Flag Conferences, the leadership of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution changed the Pledge's 'my Flag,' to 'the Flag of the United States of America.' Bellamy heartily disliked this revision, but his protest was ignored. Over a year after the U.S. became embroiled in World War Two, the Bellamy salute was finally dropped because it look like Americans were expressing solidarity with Nazism. 

        In 1954, Congress added the words, 'under God,' to the Pledge making it now both a patriotic oath and a public prayer. It is reported that President Eisenhower ‘enthusiastically endorsed’ this change but it turned out he was more concerned with being called weak on Communism or being labeled a ‘Communist” thanks to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, and reluctantly went along with the change. Bellamy passed away in 1931 but his granddaughter stated he would have hated that change as well. He had been pressured into leaving his church in 1891 because of his socialist sermons but he would have considered making an appeal to God in his pledge a type of sacrilege.

What Christians see when they say the pledge 

        

        The Pledge was dreamed up to sell flags, to promote the discovery of the continent by a man who claimed it for his God - while taking several of its inhabitants and riches back to Spain, and to bind the wounds from a recent war that still divided the country. All you had to do was make a commitment, not to the American idea or its Constitution, but to a piece of representative fabric...sort of like pledging allegiance to the Bald Eagle.

        How about making this commitment: I pledge allegiance to the universe and all the life which it supports…one cosmos, in our care, irreplaceable, with sustenance and respect for all.

Ban all Religions Until the Test Results Come Back Positive

        

        Last week Donald Trump, in his usual inimitable fashion, again made an incendiary comment that aroused great anger, from fellow Republican presidential candidates, and almost everyone to the left of Trump. But not to his supporters; they loved it. They can’t wait to have Trump banning Muslim immigrants...actually anyone they don’t like...and ignoring established U.S. laws, policies and regulations….”Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...and turn them away."

         But as wrong as I think Trump is, he may have stumbled onto a very good idea. It just isn’t restrictive enough. Let’s run with his idea of banning a religious group. If I agreed with his position, then we shouldn’t stop there; we should go even further. Let’s not just ban Muslims from entering the U.S., let’s ban ANY religious person. Yes, ban them all… until they’ve passed a test indicating they understand the separation of church and state, that they will uphold and defend that separation, and that our Constitution supersedes ANY law that's in someone’s holy book.

        This ban would not just apply to foreigners hoping to resettle in America, but also to anyone who already lives here. For example, if Christians promote an interpretation of their God’s laws as somehow overriding the Constitution, they need to be removed to another place, say, the Vatican, until such time as they take a test proving they understand this is a secular nation and the Constitution is the ONLY law of the land. They can practice whatever religion they want in their own homes or in a place of worship (that would no longer be tax-exempt), but they cannot claim their God’s law is higher than Constitutional law.

        It doesn’t matter if the believers are Hindu, Mormon, Buddhist, Shinto, Zoroastrian, or they worship of a pile of rocks. They must show, via both written and verbal testing, that they acknowledge their religious laws stop at our border. They do not supplant any U.S. law at any time…period!

         If they are Muslim and disagree; Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, and even ISIS are all trying to implement Sharia. Let them live there and practice their faith. Or if they are Mormon and believe that what Elohim says overrides U.S. law, expel them to one of the uninhabited islands of the Alaska archipelago until testing confirms they fully understand and comply with the Constitution.

         Trump's not the first. Whether anti-British, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, anti-black, or anti-Commie...down through history, Americans have loved vilifying and repressing others.

        

         Now, far be it for me to point out to the oh-so-wise and well-informed Trump, who clearly hasn’t studied U.S. history, we already tried banning certain groups…the Chinese in the late 1800s, the Japanese in World War Two, and Communists during the 1950s. It just doesn’t work, and won’t work, even if we turned this nation into a completely fascist dictatorship like, say, Nazi Germany. So rather than banning, the best step is to make sure everyone understands we are not bound by the religious laws of any gods, or any religious sects.  

        Trump’s pandering to squeamish, anxious white xenophobes gets great press, but it won’t get him elected president. However, if he’d go along with a test given to every religious person immigrating here, or living here, so we can get them up to speed on how the Constitution works, then he and I might have some common ground to discuss ideas.

Know your Constitution