Right Idea, Wrong Reason

Let me be the latest to offer encouragement to the Tennessee Christian student who made the news for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance and the Quaker who refused to sign a loyalty oath for a teaching job in California.

Yes, that’s right: I’m taking the side of the theists on this one.

Of course I think their reasons for their defiance are misguided; of course I think they’re just allowing one form of blind fealty to supersede another. But motives aside, they are in the right on this one.

Requiring any citizen for any reason to swear any sort of fealty oath is antithetic to the very freedom and democracy we claim to be spreading through the world at gunpoint. (Note please that I am not speaking of oaths to uphold the law and Constitution, which are perfectly reasonable to ask of public officials, police officers, etc – just so long as it’s done with the explicit restatement of the citizens’ rights under those very laws to protest them and effect changes.) The Pledge and its more sinister potentially legally-binding, signed-document cousins are traditions born of jingoism and paranoia that, like religion, encourage an abandonment of reason in service to some higher power. They promote the kind of mentality that turns us into a nation of Stadium Patriots, rowdy fans who support the home team with cries of “Go USA! We’re number one!” while swilling enough watered-down beer to keep from noticing that this game isn’t going so well. In fact, the last couple of seasons have been lousy, and maybe there needs to be a shake-up in the management team, but hey, what really matters is that the franchise has a lot of world championships under its belt and things will get better if we just keep cheering and buying more red-white-and-blue pompoms and team logo hats and bumper stickers and maybe some bobble-head dolls of our favorite players. Somebody speaks up and says the home team needs to make some changes? “Why does he hate the home team? T’row da bum out!”

I wouldn’t shed a tear if the brainwashing mantra that is our Pledge of Allegiance was never pushed on another public school student again. If educators really feel the need to have kids recite some short text every morning, I would suggest something less loaded with words of blind-faith fealty and more encouraging of actual thought. While I’m sorely tempted to call it “The Pledge to Pay a Little Fucking Attention Once in a While”, I’m not sure we as a nation are ready to accept “fucking” as a kindergarten vocabulary word; I’m certainly not. No, instead, let’s call it a Pledge of Reflection or a Pledge of Observation or a Pledge of Understanding, and it would go something like this:

I pledge to observe the world around me and try to understand it, never dismissing the unknown as not worth knowing.
I pledge to try to understand that the world is a very small place and we all must share it, never dismissing another’s troubles simply because they aren’t mine.
I reaffirm my rights of freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, and my equality under the law, and I recognize that those very rights are my greatest tools for their own preservation.

Yeah, it’s a far-from-perfect start, but it does the job of encouraging Paying a Little Fucking Attention Once in a While. It’s non-partisan, shows no particular favor toward any religion or school of philosophy, and, in short, is already better than what we’ve got. I think it would be an interesting exercise to present this basic idea to the blogosphere and see what others could come up with.