It strikes me as strange now — that for so many years of childhood our school day began with the Pledge of Allegiance. As strange as 10pm public service announcements on TV asking parents if they knew where their children were, or being told to crouch under our desks in the case of a nuclear bomb, or, for that matter, the whole cold war. The transformation of life into history has a way of revealing the peculiarity of things we blindly accepted while living through them. Yet, even as early as kindergarten, the daily pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America (and “the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible”) was a bone in my throat.
The requirement to chant in unison with hand over heart to demonstrate allegiance to a flag felt creepy to me, no matter what it represented. To get around it I’d stand in silence, arms dangling at my side. “A nation under God”, any God, made me queasy, the result of my own agnosticism combined with a Jewish upbringing that instilled an awareness of God as a subject on which people violently disagreed. Yet my resistance came mostly from the gut, and I doubt that at five, or eight, or 11, I would have been able to explain how, for someone born into a family whose relationship to place was essentially a relationship to inconstancy, the demand for patriotism, and even nationalism itself, could cause ambivalence. The very notion that a sense of belonging manifested itself in space rather than time (ie history) was foreign to me.
As was, frankly, the presumption that one should expect to belong anywhere at all.