Julie DelegalAll I remember was the look on my teacher’s face.
It was first-period French, and the loudspeaker had commanded all of us to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. What was it that compelled me to stay seated?
Thirty years later, I don’t recall the specific injustice I no doubt thought I was fighting. It might have been the year that my best friend and I believed — for sure — that Ronald Reagan was going to blow up the world. I’d forgotten all of it until Steve “Kurly” Kurlander’s recent column about students being required to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
I do remember Monsieur Brannon’s face, though. Not you, Julie. Not today. Please don’t do this. My teacher’s eyes pleaded pure exasperation.
He would thank me after class for relenting, for standing for the pledge, even though I hadn’t joined in the recitation. My minor rebellion, he told me, threatened to crack open a door of dissent — of disorder — that might have led the younger students astray. I was no troublemaker, he said. He knew that.
A part of me still wishes I’d been braver that morning.
Fast forward to a few years ago when I overheard my three children talking about what they say and don’t say during the Pledge of Allegiance at school. I learned that throughout their high school years, my older two had remained silent during the last, few, patriotic words: “with liberty and justice for all.”
“It’s not true, Mom,” they told me. “It’s only true for white, male, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, rich people,” my son chimed in. “Not for gays and lesbians, for sure,” my daughter added. Ever the radical, she mentioned that she also skipped the words, “under God.”
She professes atheism. I tell her not to be so presumptuous. “You’re an agnostic,” I say.
This is what we get for teaching our children to read and think, and for bringing them up in the Episcopal Church. Episcopalians are good at raising their children to question everything. It’s enough to make even a liberal like me crave, nostalgically, a little dogma.
Just a little.
And yet, I cannot disagree with my children’s protestation. The Pledge’s description of the United States is not quite true. Not yet.
So maybe the words are less descriptive than prescriptive: Our nation is built on the idea that liberty and justice applies to all of us — but the promise doesn’t fulfill itself automatically.
The promise of a nation, after all, is only as good and only as strong as the citizens who commit to its covenant.
Want liberty and justice for all?
Then work for it.
Fight for it.
Make it so.
Whether or not you verbalize your commitment to those six words in a ritualistic morning exercise at school seems less important than what you do to make them true.
