Thursday, October 11, 2012

Pledge of Allegiance Interview


Pledge of Allegiance Interview

 For this blog post I interviewed my brother’s friend, Justin, who is also very passionate about this topic. I’ve known Justin well for a few years now and I honestly think he’s one of the most interesting people I’ll ever meet. I thought he would be the perfect person to do an interview on because of how clearly he speaks his mind and also because of how fired up I knew this topic would get him. I wish I could upload a video because I don’t think I could get the emotions across by just writing them down. In my last post I felt like I didn’t speak my mind clearly enough or my emotions about the topic didn’t come through as intensely as I felt because I didn’t really want to offend anyone, but be warned in this post there is a lot of Justin’s personal opinion as well as mine, so you might not want to read if you’re easily offended about religion or patriotism.

 

Is this a problem you think is important? Why/ Why not?

Yes, I think it is definitely important to address that children should not be saying the pledge of allegiance in schools. Kids can’t even comprehend the idea behind the pledge of allegiance because there’s hidden agenda’s all over the place. First of all, God, who is not real no matter how much we want him to be! God is not real, so first of all, one nation under god… really? We created this nation to be a place of equal opportunity for everyone including all religions. To say that this is one nation under god just isn’t right.

Okay, now let’s just look at the pledge of allegiance for a minute. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of America” I mean, how can you pledge allegiance to a piece of fabric! What does that fabric mean? What is it supposed to mean. It’s supposed to be liberty, justice, and freedom for all. But it’s a lie! I mean look at all the discrimination that’s gone on in this country since it was founded. You only have those rights if the rich white men approve of you. Right now it’s the LGBT community that is fighting for their rights that the ideology of America says they should have! Those kids are pledging their allegiance to the ideology of America which is all just a lie used to keep this countries people loyal.

I mean we used to have prayer in school as well and now you do your prayers at home with your family and I don’t understand why the pledge can’t be like that. There’s no reason why, if you feel passionately about it, that you shouldn’t be doing it at home with your family. When a child is going to school he’s going to learn knowledge and facts not ideology about America that are just empty words that he can’t understand the meaning to.

It’s all just brainwashing. They don’t ever want kids believe anything besides the idea that America is amazing, and no matter how many times they say that oath America won’t be amazing. It’s all conspiracy and corruption.  It all starts with the corruption you don’t want to see and once you see it you’ll never ever be listened to. As were growing up in this world today conspiracy theories are looked at as pure lunacy. You can’t even bring up an idea that goes against the government because you’re labeled as a crazy person who is un-American. They want you to stay in the herd and conform to their rules and beliefs.


So you should definitely never have to say the pledge of allegiance when your country is so flawed and disgusting. And as a kid you don’t even know that it’s flawed! I mean in schools they’re just starting to talk truthfully about what Christopher Columbus did when this country was first found by us. They’re not going to be talking about what our government really does now! We came here and had a mass genocide with disease and murder. We look at other countries with disgust that have committed genocides and holocausts but we’ve done a lot of similar things! We just did it a lot sketchier. We traded with the Native Americans and killed them with diseases and sickness. The ones who remained we killed, sold as slaves, and put on small reservations and in workshops and is that any better than pointing a gun at someone’s face and pulling the trigger?

During WWII we put our own Japanese American citizens into camps all around the country and FDR himself called them concentration camps. People die in this world all the time and just because we were attacked one day we went to war and killed so many people. I mean look at japan we dropped a fucking atom bomb on them. I mean was Pearl Harbor bad? Yes it was. Was it the worst thing ever? No, it wasn’t. To drop a nuclear weapon on someone you have to be a fucking manic. People that are alive now are affected by what we did on that day. The planet was affected and generations of people were effected by that radiation. Now, say there’s a kid in the school whose life was affected by something that we did in a war. Say a child is a refugee from the Middle East and his father, mother, or brothers were killed by American soldiers. And now he has to listen and possibly pledge to the American flag every day. That’s disgusting. And people say “well if they don’t want to be loyal to us then they can go back to where they came from” and no they can’t, because it’s destroyed. Not everyone has the means to choose where they live some people just end up where they end up and they can’t change it. It’s just a place to live and people shouldn’t have to pledge to the ideology of that nation.

A child doesn’t even know that these atrocities have gone on. And without any prior knowledge you ask him to just give his entire life and allegiance to this nation, which is just wrong. Everything is just so flawed and so wrong.

There’s a deeper issue within our country and it’s that were all fucking scumbags! The people who are in control and decide things for us don’t give a shit about anyone. They only care about their own agendas and their own greed and money and they don’t care what happens to other people because quite frankly they don’t have to deal with it. These same people want you to grow up thinking that this place is amazing and they don’t want you to ever question that pledge of allegiance. They think that the pledge is something you should always accept when in reality there is no reason to pledge your allegiance to this country, because we don’t do good things for anyone, not even for ourselves. How can you tell kids to take a legitimate oath every day in school when no one is doing anything for them? The government that they’re pledging to won’t even give their school enough money for them to learn properly! If people are going to take an oath for a country then the country has to be giving back, and this country doesn’t give back.

Again, humans are scumbags, that is a fact. If you can get power from taking other people’s rights away and making them think that they have rights they’ll do it, and it already happened.  What a lot of people tend to forget is that this country was founded on a conspiracy. We didn’t like being oppressed by the government and we fought it and it worked. But in today’s day and age there is no way that the people could rise up against this government because the government is far too powerful. If we ever wanted to, as a whole, rise up against this country they would beat us into submission. They know that one day the people of this nation are going to rise up and say “We don’t want to do this anymore” and they’re going to have to kill so many people. And they don’t want to do that, because if they kill of all us then they won’t be able to make their money. We’re just like the fucking donkeys that they walk around all day and make us carry the load when they just sit back and relax and it’s not right. I guarantee that one day the military will flood the streets and what do you do when there’s a soldier outside with a machine gun and you don’t have one?


Do you think they would ever create a policy to ban the pledge of allegiance in schools?

 No, I don’t think they’ll ever do that because if you educate the masses they’ll realize how much you fucked them over. One thing you can’t have is national pride when there’s nothing to be proud of. Once they do this people will start getting smart, they’ll wonder why the pledge of allegiance, which they’re been saying their whole life, is being banned they’ll wonder what that means. They’ll start to wonder and realize that they’ve been lied to this whole time and that the place they live in really isn’t that great. And once you realize that life sucks! Everything sucks once you realize the whole truth. A lot of people hide from that truth their whole lives without even knowing it. And it makes me so sad and it ruins my day sometimes. But nothing will change until everyone realizes. So I’d love to think that people will eventually outlaw that but it will never happen because the government can’t let it happen because they’ll lose power. But it’s hard to talk about the pledge of allegiance when it’s not the real problem. It’s just a representation or a symptom of the problem.

 

Reflection- I absolutely loved doing this interview with Justin because we honestly have the same view point on everything, but he verbalized it better than I ever could. I just don’t understand why we still have the Pledge of Allegiance in schools when there are so many reasons why it shouldn’t be there. First of all I believe that the Pledge of Allegiance should be said at home with the child’s family. It has no place in a school where children go to learn about facts. The Pledge of Allegiance is made to the ideology of America but that is based on a lie and is just used to keep its people loyal. There are plenty of people and groups of people throughout American history that have been denied freedom, liberty, and justice.

Another reason why students shouldn’t be saying it is because they have no understanding of what they’re saying. They don’t know what the words stand for or what things their country has done in the past and is still doing now. They are too young to understand the oath they are making to their country and they should be able to make the choice when they’re older and fully comprehend the words.

One of the most blatant reasons why the Pledge shouldn’t be said is obviously the phrase “Under God” in it. This is not a nation under God! There are so many other religions in this nation that it’s just offensive to me that they still even say this is schools. Yes, an atheist child can chose to opt out of saying the Pledge of Allegiance, but what if he wants to say it. What if he wants to pledge allegiance to his nation but not to god? He is unrecognized by his nation in the pledge that is being said in the school. People need to realize that we are not one nation under God and never will be!

Not only are people’s religions different in this nation but their backgrounds and cultures are too. We have plenty of refugee families that come here after their home is destroyed. And although I’m sure they’re grateful to have a roof over their head they may not like it here and may be waiting until they can go back home. Or maybe we were the ones who destroyed their homes or killed their families. We don’t know their backgrounds and we have no right to assume that just because they live here they should want to pledge their allegiance to America.

I know for me personally, living in America is nothing special. I feel no connection to this nation and honestly it’s just the place I was born and live. I’m not going to leave because I have family here, I’m going to school here, and I have modern conveniences here. Yes, I’m grateful for these things, but does that mean I’m going to Pledge Allegiance to this nation under God? No, absolutely not. If you want to that’s absolutely fine, but I don’t think that children who don’t understand what they’re saying should be exposed to it in schools. Instead, they can say it at home with their families, which are the cornerstone of American ideology and where the Pledge of Allegiance should be said.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Pledge of Allegiance In Schools



I am a student at Salem State University and I’m creating this blog for my social studies course in Curriculum Block. This blog will focus on a common issue arising in education lately that has to do with the Pledge of Allegiance. This is a hot topic in many states because a lot of people feel that the Pledge of Allegiance is violating the separation of church and state. It’s the words “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance that have people so fired up. According to ProCon.org “Under God” wasn’t even in the Pledge until President Eisenhower and Congress added the phrase in 1954.

Recently many parents and schools have petitioned to have the Pledge of Allegiance removed from schools or at least to have the students have the option to not recite it. Many people view these petitions as unpatriotic and un-American, even the presidential hopefuls had something to say about a school who wanted to remove the pledge back in 2010. During this time the public Brookline schools in Massachusetts made a move to ban the Pledge of Allegiance in their schools. Every politician seemed to have something to say about it including Rick Perry, Scott Brown, and Mitt Romney whose quotes you can see on http://bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/2011_0910prez_hopefuls_blast_brookline_pitching_pledge_sparks_gop_furor. The one that really seemed to rub people the wrong way was Rick Perry’s comment. He stated, “Massachusetts is one of the cradles of American liberty, and it would be a sad day if their children can no longer recite the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag or freely express that we are, indeed, one nation under God”. A lot of people seem to have the same view as Gov. Rick Perry, that we are indeed one nation under God. The problem is that in 2012 we are not. Studies show that throughout the years the belief in God and religion in general has been steadily decreasing. According to HuffingtonPost.com 78.4% of the U.S. population describe themselves as Christian, 16.1% identify as unaffiliated, and 4.7% identify as non-Christian religions. So if the Pledge of Allegiance says that we are "one nation under God" does that mean that those who have a different God or no God at all are not American?

 It seems ridiculous that schools would require a Muslim or atheist child to recite this line when it is speaking of a God that is not their own. Even though it seems unconstitutional to force children to recite this in school many states still require their schools to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day. A good site to look at to familiarize yourself with the different states' laws on the issue of the Pledge of Allegiance is http://undergod.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000074 . This site has information on what states require the Pledge and what states allow students to refuse to recite it and it's shocking to me how many states still mandate it.

I remember being in elementary school and getting in trouble for not standing up, putting my hand over my heart, and not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. My brother and I grew up as atheists and knew even in elementary school that we did not believe in what they were making us say, so we refused to do it. I never believed that I was being unpatriotic or un-American, although I never understood why people couldn’t just say the Pledge at home if they wanted to. It should be a choice that children are allowed to make and not something their forced to do every morning. In my opinion only saying the Pledge of Allegiance because you’re forced to seems just as unpatriotic as not saying it at all. Being forced to say it doesn’t give one respect for their country because it’s just something that they have to do.  I believe by the time I had gotten to high school the rule had changed in Massachusetts and every student had the right to refuse to recite the Pledge. I believe that the Pledge of Allegiance should be removed from schools altogether for many reasons but if that never happens I believe that students should at least be given the right to refuse to say it.