Time to Retire the Pledge of Allegiance....

I grew up beginning each school day reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.  I knew it, I believed it.  It embodied what I hoped America would be.

Sadly, I have come to see that, more and more, the lofty ideals it contains have very little correlation with the realities of America, especially in recent decades.  And if we do not return to those ideals, then it is a lie - and it should be relegated to history.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.”  Our states are not united in any way, shape, or form.  We are a loose federation of self-serving states, each one intent on pursuing it’s own interests and agendas - and the good of the nation and the Constitution be damned.  And no, I can think of no more appropriate way to characterize that outlook.

“And to the Republic for which it stands.”  The account is given of a conversation between Benjamin Franklin and Mrs. Powel of Pennsylvania:

“Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”

“A republic,” replied Franklin, “if you can keep it.”

The Founders strenuously resisted setting up a democracy.  They recognized that democracies all meet the same fate: they devolve into struggles between factions and die.  Thomas Jefferson said, "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." Benjamin Franklin observed that “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”  And Alexander Hamilton, lionized in the musical, Hamilton, stated, “It has been observed by an honorable gentleman, that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved, that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” 

The idea of a Republic, based on Constitutionally defined principles and God-given rights protected from government intrusion and infringement was the goal.  It wasn’t perfect.  It initially incorporated compromises that were intended to be short-term, that were enacted in an effort to hold the fledgling Republic together.  The Founders were fully cognizant of its shortcomings.  That’s why they built in mechanisms by which laws - and even the Constitution itself - could be changed to eventually protect the rights of ALL of our citizens.  The incorporation of the amendatory process was the poison pill for the institutions of slavery and misogyny.

Instead, the citizens of our country have overwhelmingly chosen the tyranny of democracy.  Our schools and universities incorrectly teach and promote the misconception that we are a democracy.  The warning given by Hamilton (who, by the way, was an elitist who bought slaves on behalf of his family and was far from being the abolitionist the musical portrays him to be) has become a reality.  In its quest to be a true democracy, this country is destroying itself.  The Republic is dead.

“One nation.” We are not one nation, we are a conglomerate of many nations and interests, each intent on serving itself and imposing its will on others.  Once upon a time, those who came to America did so with the idea and intent of becoming as American as possible.  They gave up their native languages and learned english.  They learned new cultural norms. And they encouraged their children to fully adopt their new identity, to become AMERICAN.  They personified what Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his essay, “True Americanism”: “... We do not wish German-Americans and Irish-Americans who figure as such in our social and political life; we want only Americans, and, provided they are such, we do not care whether they are of native or of Irish or of German ancestry. We have no room in any healthy American community for a German-American vote or an Irish-American vote, and it is contemptible demagogy to put planks into any party platform with the purpose of catching such a vote. We have no room for any people who do not act and vote simply as Americans, and as nothing else...” That I am of german and dutch ancestry is incidental to the fact that I am an AMERICAN, yet this country has turned that idea on its head.  We are not “one nation”, we are a collection of nations in which everything comes before -American: german-american, mexican-american, asian-american, african-american, the list goes on.  And every flag, linguistic, and ethnic designation takes precedence over the idea that we are, first and foremost, Americans.

“Under God.” This is self evident.  We have declared ourselves to be a secular society.  Humanism is the religion of America.  Religion has no place in the public arena.  The ten commandments are removed from court houses.  Religious sculptures are removed from the public square.  People who declare themselves to be “Christians” divorce themselves from what they claim to believe in order to vote for individuals who in no way, shape, or form exemplify God’s values, arguing that we don’t elect a “pastor-/theologian-in-chief”.  Yet we continue to invoke God’s blessing on the USA.

“Indivisible.” Do I really need to say more about this?  We are divided and fractured along every conceivable line.

“With liberty and justice for all.”  While we have come a long way in this regard, we have far to go. Discrimination is an ever-present factor in our society.  Delivery of justice is arbitrary.  We are far from achieving the goal enunciated by Teddy Roosevelt in his essay: “... We believe in waging relentless war on rank-growing evils of all kinds, and it makes no difference to us if they happen to be of purely native growth. We grasp at any good, no matter whence it comes. We do not accept the evil attendant upon another system of government as an adequate excuse for that attendant upon our own; the fact that the courtier is a scamp does not render the demagogue any the less a scoundrel...” It is an indisputable fact that blacks were brought here as slaves, that laws have been promulgated over the years to keep them “in their place,” and that they were exterminated in large numbers when their usefulness ended.  It is an indisputable fact that chinese were brought here as indentured servants to build our railroads, work canneries in Alaska, and man our laundries.  When a section of the railroad was completed in the Snake River canyon, hundreds of chinese workers were herded into a cave and its mouth was dynamited.  It is an indisputable fact that, in no small part, our nation’s infrastructure and wealth was built in the back of slaves and indentured servants.  And it is an indisputable fact that many who call themselves “Christians” have coopted, contaminated, the message of the Bible to justify their treatment of minorities.  We have and we continue to deny justice and liberty to all.

There are many things that I am NOT saying here.  There is simply not time or space to cover everything, so please don’t PRESUME that you know where I stand on an issue based solely on what I have said here; you will likely be wrong. But it has become painfully evident to me that the Pledge of Allegiance has no correlation with the realities of life in America.  It is time to stop pretending otherwise.