Would you let Eli in?

[covenant6452]

Hmmm, We used to swear allegiance to the Queen, country and even God every morning when I started school in the early 70's back in Canada. Then it decreased to assemblies only, then not at all... I can't remember exactly when it ended.

[TΛPETRVE]

I swore allegiance only to myself and my own responsibility and that will never change.

[drakkar]

Hmmm, We used to swear allegiance to the Queen, country and even God every morning when I started school in the early 70's back in Canada.

They never bothered to even try that with me.

[sauvin]

I don't know if this is still done in the US, either, but back in the '60's, in grade school, all us little squirts were obliged to stand beside our desks, face the flag, put our hands over our hearts and "pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and the to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" when we were too young to understand the meanings of half the words we were forced to mouth. It wasn't until many years later I realised this was meaningless because half of us weren't even bright enough or experienced enough to have figured out how to keep from wetting our own pants, let alone have the wit or the perspective to pledge allegiance to anything less immediate and concrete than hot dogs we were about to slobber with ketchup and consume.

Justice and liberty for all? Heh.

[TΛPETRVE]

Justice and liberty for all?

Euphemism for "Survival of the fittest" .

[Stormchoir]

Justice and liberty for all?

Euphemism for "Survival of the fittest" .

I remember doing this into the 80's I think. Thinking back on it now, it does leave a bit of an odd taste.

[lombano]

I did a year of high school in the US in the 90's and they had the Pledge of Allegiance thing but there was no attempt to pressure anyone to recite it.
In Mexico in schools (and I think i's still the case) every Monday we had a flag ceremony consisting of singing the anthem* and saluting the flag and having a bunch of kids marching around with the flag (a 'reward' for being good students). I remember, when I was in elementary school, once on Flag Day there was a special ceremony in which we swore allegiance (we must've been 10 at the most).

*Which is in antique Spanish so that many of the words are incomprehensible to adults, let alone children.

[Lacenaire]

Should I describe here what we had to do at school when I was a child? I don't really want to, it should be obvious to anyone, but I guess it probably isn't. I don't think many people here have lived in a country where as a small child you knew that you should not repeat what you here at home outside. When kids had to answer questions like "why is the power in the hand of the people?" with some nonsense about the "means of production" that you had to memorise by heart, or other stuff about the Party being the "vanguard of the people". And that in a country where more then 95% of the population were fiercely anti-communist (including many communist party members) and the kids believed exactly the opposite of what they were told in school, by teachers who also mostly did not believe in any of it. We were also being prepared for war all the time. "Military preparation" began in middle school, we had to learn to recognise Nato planes and throw fake hand grenades. At that point we left the country.
The communist constantly tried to scare the population with war, but since the children tended to turn everything upside down, they keenly awaited it, sure that it would mean the end of Soviet Union and independence of Poland. I still remember some kid singing "Jedna momba wodorowa i wrocimy znow do Lwowa" - "one hydrogen bomb and we will return again to Lvov" (the Polish name for Lviv, now in Ukraine).
My father was a Communist Party member, he could not have been a professor of economics otherwise - but since 1956 he had been an anti-communist. He resigned his party membership after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, but of course you could not resign from the Communist Party - he was expelled "for hypocrisy" and fired from his job. That was also when the anti-semitic campaign of 1968 started, as a result of which we were allowed to leave - after being deprived of Polish nationality.
Earlier in my childhood I was a kind of unorthodox marxist - a naive believer that communism was good but badly implemented. That put me in a minority of one in a class of 40. But everyone, every Pole I new in my childhood and still most of those I know today was intensely patriotic - nobody would admit that they would hesitate to give up their life for their country. The atmosphere was then and to a large extent is still, as different from most of the West as can be imagined.
There were many other things that I will skip. But one important thing was that, although these were no longer Stalin's days, people were still terrified of the secret police, whose agents were everywhere. I mean grown-up, kids at least pretended they did not care. But I remember my father, who had taken part in the Warsaw uprising in a unit that fought German tanks with home made Molotov cocktails and flame-throwers and whom I thought was the bravest man in the world, showing visible fear when he had to be interviewed by them before going on a fellowship to the US.

I can't really talk of such stuff to people brought up in the West - they almost never understand anything. But all that is exactly the reason why I would gladly recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States and mean every word of it.

[EEA]

When I came to the US that is what they use to do every morning in the school sing the Pledge of Allegience and I mumbled my way through it. Even in Guatemala they did the same thing. Even now it feels weird to remember reciting the Pledge of Allegience since no one bother to tell me why I should learned it.

[Wolfchild]

... every Pole I new in my childhood and still most of those I know today was intensely patriotic - nobody would admit that they would hesitate to give up their life for their country.

People talk about how the end of the Cold War was signaled by the toppling of The Berlin Wall. No one ever seems to mention how the wave that pushed over that wall started as a ripple in a shipyard in Gdansk. That was where the first crack in The Warsaw Pact emerged. And that was no time or place for cowards.

Even so, what does all this have to do with letting a pale, large-eyed little waif into your home for some hemophagic refreshment?