Mumbled oaths: What to do about kids and the Pledge?

I had heard it was making a resurgence during the Trump years.

For a couple of decades, I enjoyed entertaining people in other countries with my tales of Cold-War-era American schoolroom machinations, when we were required to stand and solemnly pledge allegiance to our flag and then practice hiding under our desks for shelter from Russian missiles.

Creative Commons image by Charlie Marshall

Since Trump took office, I have heard increasing reports that old Pledge statutes have been revived and more and more schools require the recitation of the oath again.

With one of my kids going to school in the US this year, that reality has hit home. My daughter is attending school in Oregon this year, while living with her grandmother, and scarcely a week went by before a note came home from the teacher directing her guardians to explain the importance of the Pledge to her.

My mother’s response was, “Well, it might be an issue, since she is a dual citizen.”

That wasn’t my first inclination, but she does have a point there. If one did believe in the Pledge, wouldn’t it be an issue that a kid clearly couldn’t pledge all loyalty to only one of their two nations? I wonder if school officials in rural Eastern Oregon even know that a person can have more than one nationality. But I frankly doubt they care, since back in my day they always insisted that immigrant children and atheist children swear to the flag and under God, regardless of reason or feeling.

I am sure it was controversial back in the 1980s too… somewhere. But it wasn’t controversial in rural Eastern Oregon where I grew up. There was no public voice of dissent and thus no controversy.

At that time, there was no possibility of open challenge or opting out in school. But there was also no question that my family were dissidents. Some of my earliest memories involve standing on a sheet of black plastic in the sunshine while adult hippies cut out around my shadow to use as a template for chalking onto the streets during nighttime direct-action protests against nuclear weapons.

Some will always claim that anyone critical of their government, must “hate their own country.” But we didn’t hate America. We just didn’t think America was much different from any other part of the globe.

I loved the land I grew up on passionately, but I was not particularly interested in where the borders were. When I was seven, my family spent a few months in Mexico and I quickly bonded with local kids. As a teenager I was concerned about justice for Central American people brutalized by US-backed paramilitaries. Even living in such an isolated, rural place I was aware of and focused on the wider world.

So, it did not seem reasonable to me that I should pledge my allegiance to a flag or the nation for which it stood. My allegiance was already given to truth and justice and human rights wherever they stood. Certainly, my parents instilled some of this in me just by talking politics and hanging out with other people who talked politics in a progressive, international and compassionate spirit. But a lot of the spit and fire for it probably was of my own making.

My older brother also had a significant influence on me and was similarly disposed. When I first entered school, he warned me about the Pledge and eventually he also gave me the means to deal with it, apparently unbeknownst to our parents.

It may be worth pointing out that we had been brought up in a dissident family, where our spirituality, our politics, the extra garden plot out in the woods and even our reading choices, were clearly in opposition to the mainstream and better kept quiet. I don’t recall my parents or any other adult in our circle of friends explicitly telling me to keep our beliefs or politics secret, but I think my brother may have sworn me to silence for my own protection.

So, we did not challenge the Pledge openly either. By the time we entered school, we knew the authorities of society would not take kindly to our views and that we were too small a minority to change things. At least, I’m assuming that’s why we went straight to subterfuge. We weren’t habitually dishonest in most things.

My brother’s method, which he passed on to me, was to recite different words—based on a quote by Matt Groening—that are close enough to the Pledge to go undetected by the casual lip-reading of teachers. The point was not to make a serious alternative pledge that actually meant something. The point was to simply opt out of the one on offer without being detected, even if we happened to be leading the Pledge in front of the class.

For that possibility, it still had to start with the same few words, so we departed a little from Groening’s original and said. “I pledge allegiance to the flakes of the untitled snakes of a merry cow and to the republicrats for which they scam: one nacho, underpants with licorice and jugs of wine for owls.”

It worked fine and saved me from agonizing over being a hypocrite. For many years, I firmly believed my brother had invented it himself, but the wonders of the internet have lead me to its original source.

In any event, when I told my mother this, she was shocked and appalled and forbid me to teach it to my daughter. For one thing, the local school is a charter school and she immediately had visions of my daughter being expelled for unwisely sharing our version, regardless of the 2020 Oregon law that makes it technically legal for kids to opt out of the Pledge. And under the “my roof, my rules” law of our family, my mother gets to call this one.

The truth is that my daughter was not brought up in the atmosphere I knew as a child. We have never hidden much and while we are still outside the norm, inside the US or outside it, I haven’t raised my kids to fear authorities or to keep secrets. I didn’t think I had to, and while I think a parent has got to do whatever it takes to protect their kids in the situation at hand, I don’t think fear and secrecy is the best policy unless safety requires it. If I can choose, I would rather choose openness.

And as such, my daughter is ill prepared for this situation and hasn’t been good at keeping secrets, even about things like someone’s birthday present.

So, what can we do as parents and grandparents if a child doesn’t want to recite the Pledge? Well, there are a few options:

1. One could research local laws, and use them.

2. One could tell a reluctant child to simply mouth the words and not think about it too much, whether they want to or not.

3. Or one could discuss the issues with the child and figure out what part is bothering them and help them secretly change just those few words that bother them most. The child could pledge allegiance to the earth or to truth and justice or something of the like, reciting the edited version without actually informing the school.

The first option above—the option to use laws and reason to demand the child’s right to remain silent during the pledge—is something that has to be chosen based on the specific situation and the openness of the school administration. I might fight that fight if I was there in person and my child had a strong opinion on the matter, but I also might not.

As I said, Oregon law actually makes it legal for a child to remain silent during the Pledge. However, as I discovered as a child with a disability, integrated into an unwilling school by legal force, using that one in a school that is against it can make for a miserable experience.

It would take energy and time that might be better spent elsewhere. And it could result in lengthy homeschooling, which would be exceedingly difficult with my particular child. This decision really depends on the local community atmosphere, how committed the child is and whether or not the child is completely alone in their reticence.

The second option is my mother’s first choice and she was the one who successfully taught me to fly under the radar.

It would also be true to my daughter’s Czech roots. The Czechs—being a tiny nation squashed between superpowers—long ago perfected the art of pretending smiling loyalty to whomever held the castle at the moment.

Just recite and block it out. That was my husband’s first inclination, having grown up with similar anti-democratic tactics under the Communist regime of the East Bloc. His response was: “She’ll just have to bow her head the way we did under the totalitarian Communists. Her father and grandfather and great-grandfather all did it, and so can she.”

“As far as I heard great-grandfather went to jail several times rather than bow his head,” I ventured.

“Yeah, but he too learned in the end.”

I am not really as opposed to that kind of dodging as you might think, given my vehemence about integrity. I dislike it for what it tells kids about oaths, keeping one’s word and integrity, but I can also make up creative ways a kid could interpret those words.

If you are being forced to swear something through rote recitation in a group, I don’t believe it reflects that much on your honor if you don’t mean it. The shame belongs to those who would practice such abuse of an oath, one which permanently cheapens and degrades the concept of one’s word for an entire generation..

The final option is the one I am most likely to recommend to others. If swearing allegiance to a flag and a state and under a god that you don’t believe in bothers either the parent or the child or both, there are options. Certainly, I would prefer to teach children openness, integrity and the sacredness of an oath. But this may well be the best of the bad options those in positions of power have left to us.

If it is the “God’ part that bothers you, which is understandable for some of my Pagan friends, a child could recite “one nation under the gods” or “one nation under the sun.”

Despite my Pagan persuasion that isn’t actually my primary issue, though i don’t like the god bit either. My issue would be with swearing to a flag and to one nation. A child could recite, “I pledge allegiance to the flags of the United Nations, and to the earth for which they stand, one world, indivisible, under the sun with liberty and justice for all.”

Even that clearly isn’t perfect. Not all the states of the United Nations are anything you’d want to pledge loyalty to. But it’s close and it matches the wording enough that while it is easier to detect than my brother’s version, it is less likely to cause offense if exposed and more likely to be accepted by authorities as a reasonable alternative.

A child could insert, “the flags of my countries” if the issue is strictly that the child has allegiance to more than one nation.

For me, this is still very much a stop-gap measure, even if such alterations were officially approved by school officials. My greatest beef with the Pledge is not its wording, not the one nation or the one god or anything of the like. It is the way it handles oaths of loyalty.

i firmly believe that an oath should mean something quite sacred and it should always be a true act of will, i.e. voluntary.

Each autumn, there is a week in which I put images of the Roman goddess Fides, goddess of oaths, up on my altar to give offerings to her and restate my oaths—oaths of marriage and adoption, oaths of loyalty and pledges to action. This just happens to be that week as well as the week of this minor crisis for my family.

Those who claim the Pledge of Allegiance is something positive for teaching civics are sorely mistaken in my view. I find that the Pledge not only does not teach good civics, it does the opposite. It teaches children, even those who don’t have an issue with it, that an oath of loyalty is something akin to words everyone is forced to mumble regardless of the meaning.

It is also like dedicating an infant or toddler to a religion they don’t yet understand. An oath forced on a child is not sacred. It is instead something vile and antithetical to honor.

Even if all oaths may not be entirely voluntary even in adulthood, we as adults at least have some idea what they mean and what the consequences of not taking such an oath may be. Even if forced into an oath, an adult should do all they can to keep it. Otherwise, we should be prepared to take the consequences of not making such an oath or the consequences of breaking it. Sometimes oppressive circumstances make that a terrible choice. But we have the choice.

A child who is told, “Stand here, raise your hand and say these words,” isn’t bound by honor in that way. But the child is taught by this that oaths are cheap and meaningless mumbles. That is the wrong hidden deep in the Pledge.

It is no surprise that the more authoritarian and fascist a state is the more such rote, mumbled oaths it requires. I know it is incendiary to call the Pledge of Allegiance fascist. Clearly it is not such a terrible thing on a day to day basis. I’ve lived through it along with most other Americans. But it is akin to fascism in that it promotes the concept of the automatic, thoughtless loyalty that fascism is built upon. That is the harm in a few seconds of mumbled words at the start of the day.

Here is one of my oaths, one I mean and which I recite anew with each new moon. I don’t make my kids say it because I believe it should be fully empowered through choice.

I pledge allegiance to the goddess of compassion and strength, and to the planet earth for which she stands, one ecosystem under the moon with interconnection and hope for all.

This is the oath I hold above all others. I have, out of necessity, made sacrifices of my comfort, time, resources and safety in the protection of the earth and I expect I will be called to do so again, in accordance with this oath. That is what such a pledge of allegiance should mean, after all.