The Libertarian Pledges
by Max Raskin As a high school junior, it always entertains me when I see how people get so worked up over the Pledge of Allegiance. I hate to break it to you, but honestly, most students don’t care one way or another what they have to say in the morning. As Lewis Black says, the Pledge is nothing more than coffee to wake up groggy students; no one really cares about philosophic ideology at eight in the morning. But let’s say that I was an extremely contentious young person and did care about issues like the nature of our federal union first thing in the morning. I delved into the recesses of my memory to recall the single incident I have ever had with pledging allegiance to a flag. The story begins, as most stories of civil disobedience do, when I was in second grade. Because my school was celebrating multiculturalism, along with the usual Pledge, the class had to sing "The Star Spangled Banner" along with "O, Canada." Normally, I would have been fine with this, but I had been reading Thoreau the night before – after Goosebumps, of course – and I didn’t feel like praying along with the rest of the class. So, in an act of political defiance akin to standing up to a column of tanks or reading a book in front George Bush, I started laughing about halfway into the singing of "O, Canada." While it may have been unintentional, with the laughs simply coming from my mirth with Canada (I still get a little chuckle from those wonderful people), I was nevertheless sent down to the principal’s office. Needless to say, I did not mount a carefully reasoned argument against statist inculcation or the tacit coercion involved in making us swear allegiance to any flag, but rather shut my mouth while I was chastised for my flippancy. Looking back on the event, not only do I not regret insulting the Canadian National Anthem, but much in America would have to change before I felt any compunction about not saying the Pledge. Had I been the contrarian that I am today, I would have offered some sort of cogent argument against the Pledge and its message that would have resembled what follows: First off, however unruly I was behaving, there is no way that I was any less disruptive than stopping class time to say our statist prayers. However insignificant the time may seem, the very fact that we have to stop class so that we can pledge allegiance to an inanimate object is pretty absurd. School is a place for learning, not indoctrinating. There has been much argument over the words "under God," yet no one questions the basic premise of the Pledge. That’s what I want to do. Our country was founded upon the classically liberal position that government is designed to protect our life, liberty, and property. In other words, we are not created for our government – our government was created for us. If anything, it should be the politicians who begin their days with a pledge to the people who elected them. The politicians’ only purpose, if they have any, is only to secure our rights. Although, expecting a politician to secure our liberties is like anticipating a successful AA meeting at Oktoberfest. We have to give our allegiance not to our family, our friends, or even our communities, but to the abstract concept of the federal government. I don’t know about most people, but I don’t feel particularly loyal towards things that don’t really exist. The government is not a living entity that can feel happiness or sorrow, yet we are expected to treat it the same way we do our loved ones. Another point to note is that most people are unable to distinguish a country from its government; they confuse society with state. Don’t forget – they’re the government and you’re not. Now for a brief history lesson. These facts may shock some of you, but the Founding Fathers would never have consented to pledging allegiance to the federal government. Thomas Jefferson didn’t even think to put that he was President of the United States on his tombstone. Far from being an integral part of our American heritage, Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge in 1892, over a hundred years after the American Revolution. Like Das Kapital and John Edwards’s speeches, the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist who was simply furthering his own statist agenda. When Bellamy wrote the Pledge, he didn’t even think to include the words "under God" – so I don’t really understand why religious people want this prayer praising the left’s secular deity, the state, said in public schools. The final point I want to note about this horrid piece of poetry is its pernicious language. Now had the Pledge been written before the War for Southern Independence (that’s the Civil War for all you Lincoln worshippers), I could understand the description of our union as "indivisible," but last time I checked, and I’ll need some eminent historian like Harry Jaffa to confirm this, but the 1890s, were, in fact, after that devastating war. Indivisible means that a country cannot be divided. When eleven states secede from the United States to form their own Confederate States of America complete with a president, legislature, and constitution, then it’s safe to say that the country was kind of…well…divided. Here’s what Bellamy had to say about our indivisible republic: "…what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation – the One Nation which the Civil War [sic] was fought to prove." These words once again show, not only that the war was not about freeing the slaves, but also that the voluntary union of states that had existed before the war, ceased to exist and was replaced with an expansive, centralized government – the exact kind of government our Founding Fathers warned against. It’s simply impractical to ask students to do this kind of thinking outside of school. Now I’m not being overly dramatic when I say it is indoctrinating because, while most students won’t go on to contribute to political thought, they have a subconscious need for the state, imbued in them at a young age. There’s really no point asking them to put in extra work after school to try and dispel such nonsense, but one can hope. Instead, the burden is on people who can vote and have a desire to effect political change. But while voting is certainly an important aspect of change, it cannot be our sole method. We need to fight the ideas of the state on our terms, not theirs. Electoral politics can only take us so far – we need to have a real reawakening in this country where we rediscover the principles of liberty and freedom from coercion. I hope that just thinking about why we say the Pledge is one small step in that direction. February 28, 2007 Max Raskin [send him mail] goes to high school in New Jersey. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |