Silence for the Pledge of Allegiance

© diane green

It’s a rough memory being one who grew up in 1960s and 1970s, hating the war in Vietnam. I was in Junior High School. It was perhaps the year I was in 8th grade…or it could have been a year earlier, just after the 4 students were killed at the Kent State war protest. Hard to remember. In 1970 I was in 7th grade and on May 5th everyone at Richland Junior High was wearing black ribbons around their left arms. By the time I got to school there were no ribbons left so I used a black ball point pen to create my own black armband. For that, I was sent to the Principal’s office by my ultra Right-winged and racist algebra teacher.

But that was nothing, I was used to being singled out for that sort of troublemaker efforts. The day I remember so very well was the day I refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. Nixon had been re-elected. The hideously criminal war in Vietnam was continuing in living color soldiers shooting in the jungle on the 6 o’clock news. The USA had massacred indigenous civilians in their homeland in Vietnam, the worst was Mỹ Lai. Army 2nd Lieut. William L. Calley and his platoon murdered between 350 and 500 unarmed and unresisting Vietnamese civilians at that small South Vietnamese village. Calley was tried for murder but let go in 1974.

I wasn’t feeling very patriotic.

I announced one evening at the dinner table, “I’m no longer saying the Pledge of Allegiance in home room anymore.”

My mother looked astonished and said, “You oughta be whipped!”

My father stood up, pointed to my bedroom and we walked there together. He took off his belt and whipped my back a few times.

I felt the pain, somewhat, but was really surprised when he just sat down on my bed and began to cry. I sat next to him and gave him a hug. He knew I was carrying out my FREEDOM to express my opinion as declared in the Bill of Rights.

Over time I learned more about what my father had to do in WWII. He had to separate mixed families in Alaska who may have a Japanese husband or wife and sent them to the American version of a concentration camp, which known as the Internment Camp.

This was especially hard for my dad to do because he had become an orphan at the age of 7 years old. He loved my mother, my sister and me more than anything in existence.

This all became a foreshadowing of things to come, of what we were taught to believe, rather than how to believe. War is BIG business, the Number 1 Cash Crop of America. If they spent 10% of what they spend on war onto something like education, ending homelessness, mental health, food shortages, things would be much better. But what do I know?

The global problems we have today all started with the Nixon Administration.

Peace.