The other day I was attending the reception for the Palos Verdes Land Conservancy’s Home Tour when I ran across an old acquaintance who immediately scolded me for being “unpatriotic” for not standing up for the National Anthem when it was played by the Golden State Pops Orchestra at the Warner Grand Theater for their Memorial Day tribute, “We Remember, A Tribute to Fallen Heroes.” I have taken a lot of heat over the years since the Vietnam War days for my politics, in part because I stood up as a conscientious objector, but even more so for my continued abstinence from saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

My not standing up for the National Anthem is a protest on moral grounds that killing in any form, except for personal defense, is objectionable and the second, my not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is my personal protest of the Pavlovian recitation of hypocrisy that we Americans so blindly follow, thinking that the mouthing of certain words in unison makes us somehow “patriotic.” What I would remind my former acquaintance and all of the summer patriots along with him is simply this––there is a vast difference between the symbols of patriotism and the true acts of being a patriot. The problem is that we have both leaders and (apparently) followers who do not know the difference between the two.

Standing up for freedom or defending liberty in your daily life takes far more courage than standing up for the National Anthem or the Pledge of Allegiance at a concert or at a Lions’ Club meeting. The Civil Rights workers who were beaten and even killed for defying the Jim Crow laws of the South during the 1960s, or Caesar Chavez’s grape boycott demonstrations are both heroic acts of patriotism that are hardly mentioned come Memorial Day celebrations. Resistance to tyranny in any form is as truly patriotic to the American creed of liberty as is motherhood and apple pie for Kansas. But I don’t generally make a big deal about it. If it makes you feel good or patriotic to stand up, sit down or put your hand over your heart and recite a few words that you don’t think much about, that is fine with me. But don’t call me a “communist” because I’m actually expressing that freedom by not participating!

Even more so, these days it seems quite antiquated to be speaking in terms of allegiances to nation states at all––being a patriot to one country over another, or even one faith as opposed to another. With the rise of the “global economy,” we find ourselves in an increasingly interdependent world, where some 42 percent of what we consume comes from trade with China and the rest of the Pacific Rim nations. There isn’t much that gets made in America anymore. And being a loyal American consumer means buying fruit from Chile, oil from Ecuador or Saudi Arabia, cloths from Indonesia, electronics from China or shoes from the next cheapest labor market.

Loyalty to almost anything American, from pet food to automobiles, has kind of gone the way of fealty to the crown—and this without even a good Boston Tea Party to celebrate its passing. If nothing else, we should recognize that there is a higher imperative encompassing a universal loyalty to the world or to mankind’s survival in general. With the rising levels of industrial pollution causing global warming, what difference do national borders make? The carbon pollution from one continent warms the whole globe, without respect to any borders. In this sense, old fashion national patriotism takes John Donne’s words that “no man is an island” to its most rational, universal end.

There are no borders worth defending if mankind decides to annihilate itself. There will be no nation states to raise a flag for, or to pledge allegiance to, or even to defend, if we destroy the foundation of the ecology that supports life for us all. In the end, the myth of nationalism will fall by our very efforts to protect individual sovereignty and by our insistence on official, yet imaginary, lines drawn on maps that separates us from them.

So, on this coming Flag Day, when you are asked to recite the pledge or on the Fourth of July you stand up for our nation’s proud anthem, please ask yourself exactly what it means for you today. Are you doing it because everybody else is or do you really consider the meaning of it in this time of war, terror, and the greed of oil profiteers?

In the end, patriotism is not a passive act of compliance due to custom, tradition or peer pressure, but an assertion of beliefs expressed by actions. In other words, don’t tell me what a good patriot you are without doing something courageous.

Oh, and one more thing—“The Pledge of Allegiance” was written by a Christian socialist, a Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy in 1892. It reflected ideas shared by his first cousin, Edward Bellamy, author of the American socialist utopian novels, Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897). It was specifically intended to strengthen a sense of commitment to something higher than the raging materialism of the Gilded Age.

He was the chair of a committee of state superintendents of education in the National Education Association, and as such, prepared the program for the public schools’ quadri-centennial celebration for Columbus Day in 1892. It was structured around a flag raising ceremony with a salute— his ‘Pledge of Allegiance.’ He originally considered including “equality” in his pledge, but did not, because he knew that other members of the committee, opposed to equality for blacks and women, would not agree to it.

“Under God” was not inserted until the mid- 1950s, when, during the height of McCarthyism, it was necessary to include in order to distinguish our form of thought police from the Soviet Union’s.

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