District Six Supervisor Jane Kim rises with her fellow supervisors for the Pledge of Allegiance at each session of the Board of Supervisors, but she does not recite the pledge and has not done so since taking office last month, Fox KTVU reports.
Kim said that she believes it is a personal decision of how to honor the flag and country and has been surprised by the criticism.
"I don't think our flag represents a nation where there's liberty and justice for all," argued Kim.
Education, politics, and anything else that catches my attention.
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
An Insider's View of San Francisco
An outsider, a tourist, would only see this side of San Francisco. Dig a quarter of an inch deeper, though, and this is what you find:
I don't have a problem with patriotism, or expressing one's love and devotion to their country in public or in private. But there's something about watching a room full of people mindlessly chanting their devotion to not a nation or a people, but to a government, that gives me the heeby-jeebies.
ReplyDeleteI don't say it mindlessly, I actually think about the words. Apparently you don't, or you'd realize that you're pledging allegiance to the flag and to the Republic for which it stands--not a government, but one nation. Heck, when the very word whose absence you lament is in those words that you utter mindlessly, that is what should give you the heeby-heebies.
ReplyDeleteThe Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy (1855–1931), who was a Baptist minister, a Christian socialist, and the cousin of socialist utopian novelist Edward Bellamy (1850–1898). Bellamy "viewed his Pledge as an 'inoculation' that would protect immigrants and native-born but insufficiently patriotic Americans from the 'virus' of radicalism and subversion."
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Students_pledging_allegiance_to_the_American_flag_with_the_Bellamy_salute.jpg
I always read it as pledging allegiance to the Republic, which represents the nation. Not pledging allegiance to the nation directly. But perhaps that's just my interpretation. Allegiance to a government which represents a nation, and allegiance to the nation itself, are very different things.
ReplyDeleteWhen you look at a classroom full of kids, how many do you think are actually carefully considering the words they're saying, and how many are just doing it because they've always done it and everyone around them is doing it? I know that when I was a kid it was just that one thing we did right after the bell rang and then afterwards it was TWO WHOLE HOURS until recess.