“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America ...”
I was amazed that in 2013, I still remembered the pledge since the last time I stood and recited it was in 1962 when I was in eighth grade. But in 2013 I went to see Theresa Caputo (aka The Long Island Medium) the first time she came to St. Louis to give a group reading.
I admit I was skeptical that in a crowd of some 3,000 people, it was unlikely that any of my “dear departed loved ones” (which is something Theresa says to explain her process and introduce herself at her readings) might come through to communicate with me.
Still, I thought it was worth a try to see if they might pop in. They didn’t.
Before she started to channel any potential spirits in the room, Theresa asked us all to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Although I did remember all the words, I didn’t stand. By this time in my life, the symbolism of the flag had been tarnished. I would have felt like a hypocrite to stand.
People are also reading…
“And to the republic for which it stands ...”
Interestingly enough, when the U.S. Figure Skating Championships came to St. Louis in 2006, before each group came onto the ice to compete, the announcers would ask the audience to stand and sing the national anthem. Which, of course, also honors the flag.
There were on average three groups competing each day for all 14 days of the competition — novice men, novice women, novice pairs, junior men, junior women, junior pairs, etc. Once the competition ascended to the adult levels which would determine who would get to compete at the Winter Olympics, we might only be asked to sing the anthem twice. But I stood every time with my hand over my heart and sang.
So what happened in the ten years between 2006 and 2016 regarding my reverence for the flag? Everything.
“One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all ...”
Too many in the country seemed to have forgotten the indivisible part of the pledge, much less to revere the “liberty and justice for all” part.
It’s worse and more divisible than ever now, especially for those of us who are Black or otherwise marginalized.
In 1968, the year of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and then Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, two Black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who won gold and bronze medals, respectively, in the 200-meter race at the Mexican Olympics, raised gloved fists in protest on the podium as The Star-Spangled Banner played at their award ceremony.
Since the Games are supposed to be apolitical, they were expelled from the Games although they we not stripped of their medals. Ostracized by the majority of the sports community and a great majority of Americans they faced death threats once they returned home, all because — as Tommie Smith said in a 2016 interview when his tracksuit was placed in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture — “It was a cry for freedom.”
The freedom that the national anthem claims we have.
Of course, a great many of us do not have true freedom and never have had. Racism denied that to us. Now, in addition to those concerns, we have legislators at both the local and national levels who want to strip even more of us of our freedoms — including voyeurs in our bedrooms and doctor’s offices.
In September 2016, just before Theresa Caputo’s mass reading, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee at the start of an NFL game when the national anthem was played. He said it was to protest police brutality and racial inequality in the United States. That action cost him his career and garnered the predictable death threats.
Kaepernick didn’t burn, spit on or otherwise desecrate the flag. He merely expressed his right not to honor the tradition of standing.
It seems ironic that many religions require kneeling to their Gods or saints upon entering their churches, or that millions of marriage proposals are made on bended knee. Neither of these knee-related activities drew the ire of those people who condemned Kaepernick.
It’s even more ironic to witness the lack of patriotic outrage concerning flying the American flag upside-down at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s home in January 2021.
His wife, he says, has the constitutional right to express herself by flying the flag — as well as flying the “Appeal To Heaven” flag (often viewed as a symbol of the far-right Evangelical movement) — however she wants.
Where is the outrage from the so-called patriots about that?
When I went to work for the Social Security Administration in 1973, I took an oath, pledging to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, whether foreign or domestic.” It was an oath I took seriously. Pledging allegiance to the flag after that seems redundant.