I just returned from lunch at a local senior center, where I joined three friends in an enthusiastic rendition of "God Bless America" including one who is in a barbershop quartet group that had rejected me previously. So, afterwards I said, "Pretty much on tune, right." He pointed out one missed note, but said if I could keep up this musical level he could get me accepted. I love singing that song, standing with friends for whom it was part of our earliest memories, happy proud memories of being in this God blessed country of America.
While enjoying singing this song, the words a prayer to God, and then even saying, "amen" to the spoken prayer at the table offered in the name of Jesus Christ; I still do not, will not, can not, recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States. To explain this requires telling a story, my own,
We all know the words, and it seems like we always did.
I guess I said them on my first day in kindergarten, which just happened to be the same month of our winning World War II. All I knew was that there was jubilation, that everyone was celebrating, and my mother who had spent most of her time telling me to behave, not to make so much noise, handed me a pot and a big spoon, and told me that I could march around the block with some other people and bang as loudly as I pleased. I knew this was a big day.
Living in Washington D.C., I was at the center of the celebration, with planes flying over the parades of soldiers and tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue and President Truman on the radio saying important things. My dad told me that I would soon be able to get something that was so neat I could hardly believe it, a cap gun that made such a loud noise that Roger up the block could hear it right from our yard. Since there were no toy guns being made during the war, we had to improvise, which we did using our index finger. It worked great; and even without the little percussive cap or gun, the words, "Bang bang, you're dead" if your finger was pointed at the other kid was universally accepted as a hit, requiring a dramatic two hands to the chest and a fall to the ground.
But we were all the good guys, and even if we were killed, all it took were the words, "I'm a new man." and we could get up to hide and chase each other until night started to fall or our mothers called us for dinner. Only much later did I learn that other kids, some as closely related as second cousins about my age who had been born in Eastern Europe had faced a very different fate during these years.
As the years of childhood slowly passed this Pledge started to actually have meaning. "One Nation" I understood meant America, my country represented by the flag; and that we were all good people because of those things at the end of the pledge, "liberty and justice for all." I also came to realize that my family was different from our neighbors, being Jewish, and that some people were angry at me because of this. My dad would never explain why. Finally, out of his frustration with my questions, one day I saw that he was going to explain the reason to me. But all he could say, out of deep pain, was, "we will always be cursed, they'll call us damned Jews... and that is just the way it is and always will be." He had no more to say. I thought, "but why, what did we do, why do they hate us, what should I do?"
His eighth grade education, quitting to enlist in the army at fifteen during the first world war, never prepared him to explore such questions. I learned not to ask him, or my mother, or my Rabbi about these things ever again. In school we started each day with the Lords prayer and the Pledge, and at Christmas sang praises to the "king of Israel" even if by that time I understood that the new country Israel didn't have king, and if it did, it wouldn't be the little boy Jesus who was born in a manger; but what did I care. I was eight years old, and I didn't worry about such things.
And then there was something called the "government" that was all around us and where so many of my friends' parents worked. No one could explain what it meant, but I knew it had something to do with the Capitol dome that I could see in the distance where I played ball and it was big, important, and to me something mystical. In some ways my entire life has been a quest to answer the questions of that child, to explore the meaning of the words I learned to utter at school, to find out what was happening in the world when I was growing up; and be what my father always said to me when I sat next to him in his taxi cab. I always told him that I wanted to grow up to be just like him, and he responded-- not to the child asking the question, but with a rare seriousness, to the man whom I would become--, "No, I want you to be better than me."
In 1954, when I was in the ninth grade, although it seemed earlier, our teacher told us that the Pledge of Allegiance had been changed, that there were two new words added, "under God." Most Americans now alive don't remember when those words were not there, so it seems like a part of the seamless cadence of words that you were never asked to think much about. And as a Jew, I certainly then believed in God, so there was no big issue for me. In fact, I don't remember anyone making an issue about it, at school or in the news. But these two words have become quite important, as people who didn't believe in God felt left out, and some, a very few, actually one man, Michael Newdow, decided to try to do something about it.
He got as far as the Supreme Court in his quest to remove the words "Under God" claiming it alienated him from his daughter since it was promoting such a believe while he was an atheist. He lost, but it was an opportunity for every member of the Senate to stand on the Capital Steps, the more than ten percent who statistically are atheists included, to recite the pledge shouting out the words "Under God" -- loud enough for all the voters at home to hear them clearly.
The addition of those words, "under God" changed what had been a patriotic rite, with all that that means for better and for worse, into something more potent, more dangerous, a sacrament that combines nationalism with religious faith, fulfilling a great writer's warning, "if fascism ever comes to America it will be wrapped in an American Flag and carrying a cross."
The candidates for presidential nomination (2012) are following Sinclair Lewis' words as if it were their script, each wielding the phrase, "one nation under God" as a threat of exclusion, a warning to anyone who would dare to challenge their view of what America has become. This is so powerful that an early version of Barack Obama's campaign website included the description of his sponsoring a bill in the Senate to require the leading of the Pledge in all public secondary schools, not emphasizing the fact that this was for the state of Illinois.
Mitt Romney went further, the full story described in this link, While the inclusion of "Under God" was accepted as a way to differentiate our country from our geo-political enemy atheistic communism, it has remained in place even though now our enemies are those with a more fundamentalist faith in God than we that includes accepting his biblical Sharia Law to control all aspects of life, including provisions that we now find reprehensible. Yet Romney, who is the titular leader of almost half of the voters in our country, demolished the legal argument that reciting these words were mere "ceremonial deism" not to be taken literally. The New York Times article states: "But at a Saturday afternoon rally here, Mr. Romney did not just recite the Pledge of Allegiance; he metaphorically wrapped his stump speech in it, using each line of the pledge to attack President Obama."
“The promises that were made in that pledge are promises I plan on keeping if I am president, and I’ve kept them so far in my life,” Mr. Romney said, standing among old airplanes in a hangar at the Military Aviation Museum here. “That pledge says ‘under God.’ I will not take ‘God’ out of the name of our platform. ”
The reporter summarized it as follows:
"He speaks of the "promises that were made in that pledge" as if it were a solemn personal obligation that binds each American who says the words, emphasizing "Under God." Thus the elementary school children who are cajoled under fear of social ostracism to recite words, the meaning of which they could not comprehend, are bound to their oath of fealty to God.
There are many people who share my sentiments, so why would I choose to make this a public issue, when it's so much easier to just stand quietly when the pledge is being recited, or only mouth the words "under God" if saying this bothers me, and just go along with my life. That's what my dad would have done, and that's what every elected official does, Republican, Democrat, Jew, Evangelical or atheist. But that's exactly the point; that's why I have to make it clear that I am not going to recite this pledge, and to give my reasons. I realize that this may inspire rage among a few, but would advise anyone who wants to act on this impulse that this is a personal message, having nothing to do with any of my friends or family, who may or may not share these views.
This public statement has become necessary for a mundane reason, that I am currently a member of my city's Traffic Commission, which means that I must attend a public meeting where they begin each session with the Pledge. In the past I have just stood out of respect, and when once asked by the then mayor to lead it, politely declined, with a senior member of the council immediately taking over. No one was forcing me to say anything.
The paradoxical nature of our Pledge of Allegiance is illustrated by the past director of Planning of the City of Encintas who happens to be a Jehovah's Witness. While this religion now maintains a low profile; during WWII, when threatened by a people deluded into believing they could dominate the world by military power, thousands of Witnesses chose to die in Nazi concentration camps rather than accede to the edicts of hyper nationalistic ritual. They could have lived if they only extended their arm and proclaimed, "Heil Hittler." Neither this city executive, nor any of his co-religionists, any longer defend these foundational principles; rather they avoid such situations. While once those of his faith sacrificed their lives to oppose the evil of hyper nationalism, now none will risk his job.
At that time Jehovah Witnesses in this country were challenging laws that compelled recitation of the Pledge in schools. The highest court in a landmark decision in their favor closed with,
"But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."
These ringing words articulated by Justice Robert Jackson during the darkest days of WWII, were a statement of the essential quality of this country. It is this that makes us exceptional, rather than our overwhelming military power. It was why we fought against a regime where its leader had abolished due process, and those of his countrymen who had resisted such national grandiosity had all been eliminated expeditiously. We have come a long way since those days seven decades ago, when such ideals inspired a nation, individually and collectively, to risk all to protect these founding principles. We have allowed the most sacred of these principles, freedom of expression, to be diminished without a shot being fired by a foreign enemy.
Many who recite the Pledge of Allegiance do it with the same simple pleasure that I get out of singing God Bless America with my friends at a social setting -- the difference for me being that there we all attend, or join in song, only if we choose to. Those words quoted above by Justice Robert Jackson, are not self enforcing. They require individuals, whether courageous or misfits to actually take the heat of whatever reaction is elicited by others, to affirm the principle that he articulated. When the last person has refused to act on his words, they will be gone, even if they still exist in dusty old law books, or pop up when googled on the internet.
To me, this would be a national tragedy.
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