The Pledge

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, everyone else began every morning. I was sometimes forced to stand up, but I never gave in to actually saying the pledge out loud myself, even though I knew it by heart, just like every other kid attending public school in South Carolina during the late 80s.

The pledge continues:

…and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

My teachers may have thought I was unpatriotic at first, but the few who chose to have conversations with me on the basis of my budding civil disobedience began to understand and respect my point of view, and I got away without saying the Pledge for the entirety of my high school life, and I can’t remember for sure, but this might have extended all the way back to middle school.

So, what gives? Isn’t it unpatriotic to sit while everyone else is going rah rah about the flag?

Of course it isn’t. I bet you know that intuitively quite well, and I certainly knew it back then when I was a kid. My reasoning was very simple, and one question kept coming up in my mind. It was the same sort of question I posed to my teachers (if they bothered to ask):

How can one pledge one’s allegiance to something while being ordered to do so?

This fundamental principle has guided me throughout the rest of my life. It’s not so much the idea of forced patriotism and how utterly nonsensical that really is, but instead a much bigger concept I’ve had opportunity after opportunity to practice over the ensuing decades.

Incidentally, forced patriotism is utterly stupid. If you want to talk about why in the comments, please feel free:

The bigger concept here is that we do all sorts of things by custom, and the idea is not to question why you’re doing it. These customs often make us into mindless automata, going about our lives from custom to custom, operating more like drones than humans.

I suspect that many of the other kids in class resented me for not saying the Pledge. I bet there are a few categories of misunderstanding going on here. One is that I was somehow anti-American, interested in blowing up the country or whatever.

Now, I certainly enjoyed speaking up whenever I saw something wrong, even if it was our nation that was doing it at the time, but I also happen to think that that’s the patriotic thing to do. If you care about the place you live, you will want to consider various ways to improve it.

No, if anything, I cared as much about our country as they did, even if we didn’t share all the same values. Perhaps it can be argued that I cared a bit more since I protested against tyranny every day while most of the others stood and spoke, but I really think it was more a matter of them just not questioning things.

Not questioning things has its place. If you’re on a battlefield and enemy soldiers are shooting at you, the last thing you want to do is to question the leader’s plan, at least during that moment. If you’re in an operating room and a patient starts to bleed out, the lead surgeon is going to give orders and people are going to follow them, or else the patient is way more likely to die.

These are special cases, though. This isn’t life.

The surgeon doesn’t walk around everywhere he goes, followed by a small cadre of slave nurses at his back-and-call. The drill sergeant doesn’t get to have her privates make her bed first thing every morning when she’s on vacation.

No, those are exceptions to the general rule that it is much better for you to ask questions about things that don’t make sense.

If there is something we humans have done since time immemorial, it might pay to keep in mind that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, so the group of humans alive today knows vastly more than any previous group. These past generations of human beings were just as smart as us, but within the last five thousand years or so, they’ve been kind enough to write their ideas and observations down for us to study.

Those folks were smart, but just maybe you’ve thought through things a bit more clearly than all those people in the past. Perhaps superstition or other debunked ideas were at the center of the tradition, so it’s time to reconsider whether the pros outweigh the cons.

As a tween and teen kid, I certainly thought the pros of mindlessly reciting the Pledge of Allegiance vastly outweighed the cons, and I put my actions where my thoughts were. I’m sure that this protest helped to open the door for punk rock music, which helped vanquish most of that irrational desire to fit in.

Conformity became my watchword. If you conformed to norms, you might be a marching zombie, like those folks saying the Pledge every day. You might put on a suit and drive to work every morning, then drive home around 5 PM, turn on your TV, get inebriated, sleep, and then repeat the next day.

This little act of resistance against forced allegiance helped me to avoid living that particular life, I think. Because I was comfortable with questioning other customs, I felt free to question them all.

I’m not sure how useful it is to consider these pivotal moments in my life. After all, memories are malleable, and we tend to rewrite our own histories to better conform with the story we want to hear about ourselves. Nevertheless, I keep coming back to these pivot points, trying to understand myself better so that I can better understand the world.

What about you—were there moments like these, where you ultimately shaped or defined the person you would become?