Love, a Many-Splendored Thing

The Consequences of Insubordination

Oh no! The National Anthem was recently back in the news during the NCAA Women's Basketball tournament. Turned out some teams were still in the locker room rather than on the floor at the time of it being played. Don't we have more important problems to worry about?

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.

Attending public school, each day started off with the above Pledge of Alliance. We may have sang “My Country 'Tis of Thee” too. I can't remember exactly. Why we did this I was never quite sure. I have always been one to question things. However, I never really thought much about this pledge ritual until after I got in some trouble for behaving inappropriately during the pledge in my early teens. As a teenager, I started questioning things I had been taught including who gave us the title of greatest country in the world? What's the criteria and how does anyone really know that America is superior? I am not saying America is not great or that I don't appreciate it, just asking how we claimed this greatest title and why it is necessary to repeatedly tell us this when we are young and not in a position to know otherwise.

We are requested to pledge our blind alliance to our great country from the time we are old enough to go to school, which is age 5 for most of us. I don't know about you, but at age 5 I was in no position to know much about the world other than what I was being told, and for sure, my world was very small. From the age of 5 I pledged alliance to America without even knowing exactly what that was or meant. If we are so great why did we need to be told and asked to pledge allegiance? Well, asked is not exactly accurate as the pledging was never presented as optional. We were instructed to do it. Did someone think we wouldn't naturally appreciate our home country as we aged? As I look back at this it feels like I was being indoctrinated or programmed.

Freedom is most often given as the reason we are better than the rest as if we were the only country who has it. But there are other countries with freedom, actually lots of them. What makes ours the best? Pointing out countries that are way more restrictive to prove America is the best, which is the common argument I heard, is like me claiming I'm the best at something because I can identify someone who I am better than. Another argument I have been given is that so many people want to come to this country, and this turns out to be true, even those “sub-human, blood poisoning” types want in. But people also flee to other countries.

Our Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Sounds to me like we believed we are born with these freedoms. We believe that they are not actually coming from our government. So this freedom we credit to our government is really more like crediting them/it for not trying to take it away, interfere, or restrict those freedoms? I am grateful for that of course, but to my way of thinking they are not supposed to take them from us. It's not theirs to take. Um, I'd like to take this moment to thank my neighbors for not stealing my car. Well sure it's great to live in a free country, although it seems some would like to place an exception in the case of the playing of our National Anthem.

So a few of the teams at the recent Women's NCAA basketball tournament were not present for the singing of the National Anthem prior to their basketball game. It's not like they weren't standing or heaven forbid, taking a knee. They weren't even in the room for gosh sakes. By the way I wasn't in the room either and not only that when the National Anthem is played before a sporting event that I'm watching on TV I usually just sit in my chair, although sometimes I talk with others in the room. I suppose I am disrespecting America or is it the veterans. I forget exactly who we are offending in these cases. If it's our veterans, I guess I am disrespecting myself since I am a member of that group.

Anyway, back to starting the school day with the pledge and/or the anthem. When I was 14 I started 9^th grade and was assigned to the local high school (Walt Whitman) which had just competed a new extension doubling the size of the school. My homeroom was in the new section of the building. There were still a few minor finishing touches yet to be done. One of them was they had yet to install flags in the classrooms. This created a minor problem for the morning pledge as we had no flag to pledge to. The solution? We were told to pledge to the speaker in the ceiling where the pledge leader's voice was coming to us from. Maybe they played the National Anthem I honestly don't remember exactly. We were to look at the ceiling speaker because supposedly there was a flag in the room where the voice/music was coming from. It seemed rather silly to me but those were our instructions. I mean, couldn't they at least have put something (a US map? - a picture of the flag?) on the wall or black board for us to look at?

One day as the pledge was about to begin, still pledging to the speaker in the ceiling, I was talking to my friend Ron who sat in the row next to me. On this day Ron and I continued to finish up our conversation during the beginning of the pledge. Well our homeroom teacher took offense. He took it upon himself to not only admonish us but to give us a punishment assignment. I don't remember what Ron did but I initially ignored it. I didn't care for the guy to begin with. There's no grade for homeroom so it's not like I could fail it. What could he do? That didn't sit too well with him. He then impressed upon me that in fact I did need to comply with his wishes and he gave me a new assignment to write 500 words on the consequences of insubordination.

To get him off my back I did it. I wrote a story with 3 cases where someone disobeyed an instruction by their leader. The first one was a baseball batter who was up in the bottom of the 9^th with a man on 2^nd. His coach gave him the take sign but the pitch looked so good he swung at it and hit the ball over the fence to win the game. After the game his coach called him into his office to admonish him and gave him an assignment to write an essay on the consequences of insubordination. The second was about a fireman who disobeyed his chief''s order to not go into the burning building. He then learned that a 10 year old child was still in the building. He then entered it to save the child. He again was rewarded with the 500 word assignment. The third case was something about a guy in battle but the story never finishes as I ended up reaching my 500 word limit mid sentence in the middle of the story.

I turned it in and the fool graded it. He returned it to me, showing me my errors, mostly spelling, but his main comment was I didn't finish the 3^rd story. I explained I was at 500 words. I reminded him he had said explicitly I was to write 500 words on the subject and I continued to say something about how would it look if I again failed to follow his instructions on an essay about insubordination. I didn't want to risk a further assignment. This all ended with my homeroom teacher giving me a hard stare with an audible sigh. I was a quiet kid who generally followed the rules and had little history of causing trouble in school. However, I did ask questions, I did think about things, and I did tend to be resistant to following along with things that I thought were rather foolish or a waste of time. Luckily for me, we got a new homeroom teacher the next year and I never got him for a teacher.

Now back to our National Anthem: In elementary school instead of “The Star Spangled Banner” we sang “My Country 'Tis of Thee” which was sung to a British tune, “God Save The Queen”. Why? Who knows? Maybe it was because it was an easier song to sing or maybe it had something to do with being in an “Original 13” state, which will probably only mean something to you if also grew up in one yourself. “The Star Spangled Banner” is yet another British tune and was written by John Stafford Smith. That tune was used in many songs at the time including a popular British drinking song. The words of course were taken from a poem that Francis Scott Key wrote while witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Now that's a war I believe we actually lost, or at worst tied. Yes, I know we are told the fairy tale in school that we have never lost a war. But I don't see how any reasonable person can look at that war and say we won. We declared war on England. We never actually attacked England but fought battles here, on the seas, and in Canada. They captured and burned our capitol. A truce was called. They agreed to give us our capitol back and we agreed to basically drop the very issue (their interference with our trading with France) that started the war. The most famous battle, the one we all learn about in school, was the Battle of New Orleans where Andrew Jackson's troops turned back the British. It was a great victory but alas, it happened after the war was over, so rather meaningless. A sort of twist on the classic winning the battle but losing the war. Perhaps it is more like not seeing the forest for the trees...

“The Star Spangled Banner” although played and sang regularly, did not officially become our National Anthem until 1931. The idea of singing it before sporting events was started to drum up patriotism and support for government actions that were not particularly popular. Today our government pays American Professional Sport Leagues to continue the practice. Maybe they should display one of those signs that say, “Your tax dollars at work”...

Ah, we sure like to get all hot and bothered about the appropriate behavior during the singing of our National Anthem. I'll tell ya though, I'd like to see us focus more on the “all men are created equal” part of our famous declaration....