To Pledge or Not to Pledge

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." This is what we children stood and said every morning in every one of the many schools I attended. I think a few of us said (and vaguely understood) this: "I plejalejens totha flag atha Unitastasuvamerika, and totharepublik forwhich it stands, wunnation, undergod, invisible, with libertyanjustis forall."

Even when I was in grade school I knew of Madeline Murray O'Hare. I don't know if she was solely or even directly responsible for getting prayer out of the schools, but I do know that somewhere along the line the "under God" part was officially removed from the pledge, although we continued to say it as we had learned it so long ago. When as a high school junior, at the age of 15, I realized (without Ms. O'Hare's help) that I no longer believed in a personal deity, the unofficial inclusion of "under God" began to disturb me, and I stopped saying that part. No one seemed to notice.

However, in my senior year I was noticed all right, since I stopped saying the pledge altogether, and stopped rising for it.

In 1968, the year in question, the war in Vietnam dominated the TV and the radio news almost every evening, except for the duration of the Democratic Convention in Chicago and two particularly awful nights, one in April and one in August. Our high school did not permit its female population to wear dressy slacks, much less jeans. In some American towns, boys our age were being detained and given impromptu haircuts by scissors-wielding cops or teachers. It would be two years before any of us knew where Kent State University was, unless we had applied for admission there, but war protesters already were being gassed and clubbed; civil rights workers risked no less than their lives.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands..."

So far so good. Our flag was after all only a symbol -- a symbol of a country to which we felt allegiance, of which we felt proud, and which we loved. For many of us it also represented a war we deplored, and it was being burned in protest all over the land. Others were wearing it on their jeans jackets and putting bits of it in their hair in an attempt to reclaim it from the wrong in which they felt it was being unfairly involved. However, one of the many reasons we deplored the war, and one of the reasons we used (some say abused) the flag in an unconventional manner was BECAUSE we loved our country and wanted our flag to mean good things again. I was unhesitant to pledge my allegiance to the country. I had only some small reserve about pledging allegiance to the flag.

"... one nation..."

Now I had a problem. I had lived in the north and in the south, albeit not the deep south, and I knew the United States was not one nation. I knew that Birmingham, Alabama, was another country again. There was a Black nation and an Indian nation and a Hippie nation and a Plastic nation and even a silent majority, and any number of other nations. Huge gaps divided America, including a credibility gap and a generation gap.

"... under God..."

I had not said these words for a year.

"... indivisible..."

Did I mention gaps?

Some of the issues over which America was divided may have been new but the fact of the division was not. We'd had one civil war and seemed to be on the brink of another. Racial tensions had been working their way to crisis level for the past century, in the case of the still-oppressed black population, and longer in the case of Amerinds. Although there had not always been such a wide gap between young and old -- indeed, the concept of the teenager is a modern one -- between rich and poor there always had been.

"... with liberty and justice for all."

This part really rankled. The inequities of the time were unique to the time only in their intensity, and in the intensity with which some rose up to protest them.
Nearly every liberty we enjoy today represents a hard-won (and most likely only partially won) battle. The British did not get tired of ruling its colonies and set us loose with a pat on the rump and best wishes. The white American South did not get bored with slavery and begin to reconstruct just for the hell of it. Congress did not suddenly wake up one morning, yawn and decide to grant women the legal right to vote.

How many Chinese, some brought to the States as indentured servants and treated with utmost scorn, died laying railroads to benefit American industry? The planeload of illegal aliens being returned to Mexico in the 1930s died when the plane crashed in the mountains; the radio news did not bother to report their names, simply calling them "deportees." (Migrant farm workers, horribly abused during the Depression, were not faring appreciably better in the 1960s; the Triangle Factory Fire may have been an extraordinary enough tragedy to make the news in its time but in the 1990s there are still seamstresses laboring for 85 cents an hour.) My own father did not go to the university of his choice, despite his qualifications, because (as he was told) it had filled its quota of Jews.

In the 1950s thousands of writers, performers, directors and producers lost not only their jobs but their careers (many never learning why) because of two entrepreneurs who, no doubt inspired by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, started up a gossip rag which, by virtue of blackmail, became the entertainment industry's hiring and firing bible. Dashiell Hammett and Dalton Trumbo went to prison rather than testify before the Committee. Philip Loeb, until then one of the stars of TV's early beloved "The Goldbergs," jumped to his death from a window. The great John Garfield, baffled and disheartened, never worked again; he withered away and died, soon followed by the legendary (and much maligned) Paul Robeson.

Thus is should have been no great surprise when Medgar Evers was killed, Malcolm X was killed, JFK was killed, Oswald was killed, Dr. King was killed, Kitty Genovese was killed, Bobby was killed. It was not surprising that although there were black students in my home room, where the pledge was recited daily, none of them attended any of my classes. (I was on the academic, college-preparatory track; whether by design or by tradition, blacks were not placed there. A friend of mine says she was called into the counselor's office of her school and told to prepare herself to be a maid; her male schoolmates were told they would grow up to be janitors. She is now an actress, writer and orator; she travels to places of which that counselor dared not dream.)

So it was that when the class stood up to recite the pledge I remained in my seat. Oddly, during this sacred ritual, my companions were not averse to screaming, "Stand up, Feldman!" and otherwise making a racket. The teacher neither ordered me to stand nor ordered the other students to leave me alone; fortunately no one got physical but the verbal abuse was not gentle.

I wanted then, as I would like now, to rewrite a pledge that I could say. It might have gone like this:

"I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands; and to work for it to become and remain one nation, indivisible, with opportunity, liberty and justice for all...

... and that means ALL!"