As an instructional team leader, I often begin team meetings with a brief “professional learning report.” Last week I had us read a snippet from a legal bulletin about students’ right not to say the Pledge of Allegiance. A school was sued for its policy of requiring a parent note in order for a student to be excused from saying the Pledge, a policy that, according to the ruling court, violated students’ own rights to free speech.
“Yes, but,” said one of the math teachers who never makes any sense unless you figure out for him what he means to say, “You know, it comes down to, and kids will–you know, you can’t, just, I don’t know.”
Another math teacher said that he once had a student so religiously opposed to anything flag-related that when a passage about the flag was part of the state reading test, she wasn’t sure she could complete it. The principal and teacher frantically tried to contact her dad to give her permission, but couldn’t reach him and so told the student that it would just have to be her own decision. She read the passage and passed the test.
The other remaining math teacher, a proud Marine, spoke emphatically and fiercely: “I fought for this country so that people could choose not to say the Pledge. I’m sick of religious bigots who insist on Pledge saying but who’ve never fought.” (He also said that a few years ago he was upset at a student for not saying the Pledge but then learned of the student’s rights and apologized to the student for forcing him to do something that people had had to do under Nazi rule. The next day, the student started saying the Pledge.)
After the meeting, the proud Marine came back to my room. (He does this in every conversation: He’ll finish what he’s saying, walk away, remember what else he wanted to say, and come back–three or four times, usually.)
“Your position on saying the Pledge would surprise a lot of people,” I said to him.
“I volunteered to go to Vietnam twice,” he told me, “even though I thought the war was wrong. I remember sitting in tent in Vietnam arguing that we shouldn’t be there. I figured that anyone can fight a war they agree with, but it takes a true patriot to choose to fight a war they disagree with.”
But then what’s the point of having free speech, I didn’t ask him, if it isn’t to encourage action based on higher morals than even the State offers?
Throughout the morning’s discussions, I did not mention my own quiet standing by while the pubescent patriots among my homeroom students muttered the Pledge along with the principal every morning, but I imagined how the conversation would go:
“I don’t say the Pledge, for religious reasons,” I would say. “I only pledge myself to my peaceable God and to my wife.”
“That’s a right hard won through battle,” would be the inevitable reply. “The ‘peaceable God’ part, anyway.”
To which I could say only that I appreciate my freedoms, but that–and I know this is easy to say in light of those freedoms–I can only have integrity in my non-Pledgiance and nonviolent leanings if I also genuinely would choose not to have these freedoms instead of those battles having been fought.
