My co-writer at
Daily Revolution will have more to say about this tomorrow; but a word or two is in order on the subject of the "desecration" of the flag, and the near-miss constitutional amendment that has recently kept Congress from addressing realities.
I put the term "desecration" in quotes as a pointed reminder of the meaning and etymology of that term. For I am of a mind that it should be our goal as a society to "de-sacred" the flag and the government that tends to the interests of this nation. We have perhaps never in our history been further from a true separation of church and state than we are today. Here's how I expressed it in a book I wrote a couple of years back:
For most students in school, the day starts in a hilariously misnamed place called "Homeroom." Most of us would feel more at home inside a refrigerator. Anyway, the first activity of the day in Homeroom is usually a collective reading of a nationalistic catechism, which goes as follows:
I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the United States of America
And to the Republic
For which it stands:
One nation, under God, indivisible,
With liberty and justice for all.
By most accounts, this is the creation of a radical socialist ideologue named Bellamy--a man who seems like the type of fellow who might get a White House press pass these days. Why he thought that children needed to begin their day by pledging allegiance to a flag is as opaque to me as the notion of placing one's hand on a book filled with the stories of a violent, deceitful, and vengeful God while one promises to speak the truth in court or serve one's country as an elected official. But if we as supposedly mature adults have given up questioning such practices, how can we expect a six year old kid to do it? So we have to examine carefully the effects that this sort of a daily ritual has upon our psyche, and how it becomes generalized: from the understanding gained, we will be better able to disperse the falsehood projected into us by this bizarre rite.
As we do throughout this book, we begin by making sure we have a clear grasp of the meaning of the words employed. "Allegiance" is defined as "the act of binding yourself" or "the loyalty that citizens owe to their country or subjects to their sovereign." So, in pledging allegiance, we are binding ourselves in payment of a perpetually recurring debt ("owed loyalty") to a nation, a Republic, a flag.
Yes, a flag: a colored piece of cloth. Not to the Earth; not to the Universe; and least of all to ourselves and our unique and indissoluble connection with the Cosmic Source of our being. No: we are pledging a presumably eternal, or at least lifelong, debt of loyalty and attachment to the flag of a particular tribe and its state. Everything points toward a collective--the in-group and its binding claim upon our psyche--even "liberty and justice" are "for all." But not for each. This is the suppression of the individual at such a comprehensive and fundamental level that it can be said to lay the groundwork for all future "pledges of allegiance" to come in the life of each person who accepts their unyielding terms.
So how do we honor the nation without becoming a slave to a symbol? Well, we can begin by celebrating freedom. This does not mean celebrating indulgence: freedom has nothing to do with going down to BJ's and stuffing the back of your SUV with enough food and household goods to equip an entire village in southern Asia or Africa.
Celebrating freedom is more about standing up for media outlets that are being demonized for making public what was, after all, a well-known program of financial espionage (here's a related principle that may help citizens to make sense of the news: the decibel level of bluster from the neocon right on any issue is inversely proportional to that issue's real volume of controversial substance).
Celebrating freedom is about honoring what has made American democracy possible, even if it is not the ideal that flag-worshippers would like us to believe. And what is that thing that has made democracy possible here? I would suggest that it has to do with the retreat of government from religious ideology. For when god is alive in the nation, it is exactly as it is alive in nature: in silent splendor--without display, without monumentalism, without any claim or commandment made on the integrity of the individual. It is just there, transforming the whole through the realization of each.
Best wishes to everyone in the DK community, which is, after all, a celebration of freedom in itself.