As I noted last time, saying the words is just a way of "talking the talk". The real test of anything we say is whether we're willing to act on it ... to "walk the walk", to keep in tune with the rhyming metaphor.
I know lots of talkers. Lots. At the moment we're talking about American talkers, but I'm here to tell you: mutatis mutandis (a Latin phrase that means, "all the relevant changes having been made") what I'm saying here applies everywhere else I've ever been as well, and beyond. Again, this is one of those cases in which my fellow countrypeople carry their obsessions on their sleeve, but they're really not as exceptional as they might like to think they are. No, what I'm looking for are "walkers": people who are willing to put into practice what they preach, folks who are willing to do, not just say.
Even once we get past that swearing-one's-allegiance-to-a-piece-of-cloth thing and leave the realm of the actual for the more ethereal realm of the possible, what does this "oath" require? Assuming that the sayers are serious about that "one-nation" stuff, how long does it take for it all to break down? Two more words, as Fate would have it.
The original pledge, written by a fascist-friendly Baptist pastor who wanted to have it said with right arms extended forward (yes, as in "Sieg, heil"), didn't include the "under God" part. That was a 1954-we've-got-to-distance-ourselves-from-those-atheistic-Commies addition. If it's included, what does it mean for Americans today? If it's an essential or mandatory part, then, quite simply, no atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, Taoist, and, conceivably, Moslem (though the stretch is not far) can say it in good conscience. I don't know how many of these there are in America, but it's more than a handful. There are those who insist that the phrase be included, even if it excludes so many fellow "patriots". Personally, I think we can leave it out because it wasn't there to begin with, and since the Commie threat has passed, it's doubly unneeded, but that's just my own little view of things.
No, what interests me more than anything else is what follows, that short little phrase, "indivisible, with liberty and justice for all". When I look across the Pond these days, I see anything but something "indivisible": right and left, Democrats and Republicans, gun nuts and concerned citizens, North and South, East and West, the racial divide, and the treatment of immigrants -- just to name the most obvious -- point to anything but indivisibility. Which talkers are doing anything about that?
The very last six words, though, are the killer: in a country that recognizes "affluenza" as a disease, that has a disproportional number of minorities in prison, most often for negligible offenses, that has the starkest income inequality in the Western world (and is in the top 3 worldwide) and that is home to the Patriot Act, the NDAA, the CIA and NSA, that has the most militarized police force in the "free world", well, I have to ask myself, what are the pledgers doing about this?
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that all those "rising to defend the pledge" are actually just doing their part to ensure that nothing about it holds true. It's just so much hot air. What we should be doing is protecting and helping the weak and maligned, seeking ways to come together, and speaking truth to power. But we're not. We're wishing for the "good old days" that were never really good, and are nothing but old.
The way out of the darkness is not behind you, it's in front of you.
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