Because nothing says freedom like mandatory loyalty oaths.
Do you remember reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every single day in school—standing up on cue, pushing in your plastic chair, turning to face the limp flag in the corner, hand over heart like a tiny civilian soldier? In hindsight, it’s totally bizarre that I spent the entirety of my public-school education swearing blind loyalty to a piece of polyester. Who decided this was a good idea? Is there any research suggesting that robotically repeating a nationalistic poem instills anything but apathy and neck strain?
Because if the goal was to breed a generation of patriots, it didn’t stick. I grew up to be about as patriotic as my Volkswagen Jetta. Maybe it’s because I learned the words before I understood any of them. “Pledge”? “Allegiance”? “Republic”? “Indivisible”? These weren’t even in my vocabulary when I was six. By the time I could parse the language, it had been reduced to a daily mutter—meaningless sounds mumbled under fluorescent lights.
According to the Boston Globe, schools in my town don’t do the Pledge anymore, and a local high school kid is on a mission to bring it back. His argument? That it’s “a living and breathing statement” that honors our troops and strengthens civic bonds. The school board is currently deadlocked on whether to reinstate it—because of course there are six members. Excellent planning, everyone.
I could roast this teenage patriot, but honestly? I remember what it felt like to be seventeen and wildly committed to every principle I ever half-formed. I once launched a class-wide debate on whether flag napkins were more disrespectful than flag burning. I stood up in U.S. History to ask why we were still romanticizing a country thought Vietnam was a good idea. I defended the French revolutionaries for beheading their oppressors. And, I started mouthing the Pledge instead of saying it out loud. It was my quiet protest. My first foray into principled half-assery.
Had I possessed a bit more follow-through, maybe I would’ve staged my own anti-Pledge campaign. But by then, nobody seemed to care. It was the early ’90s—after the Cold War, before 9/11—and patriotism felt like a mullet: outdated, kind of embarrassing, and usually worn by someone yelling at a cashier.
Cut to a month ago: Mr. P and I played in our community orchestra’s season-closing Pops concert. The lineup was standard-issue Americana—Cats, Phantom, Singin’ in the Rain, some Cole Porter fluff. Musical comfort food. Nothing dangerous. Nothing nourishing.
And then came Stars and Stripes Forever.
It’s the platonic ideal of a Sousa march—raucous, relentless, unapologetically jingoistic. It summons a strange surge of emotion: the urge to wave a flag, kiss an apple pie, and scream about taxes.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=l9EQik8s310&si=PgJy8kq2BrZEJFrg
Mr. P hated Stars and Stripes Forever. As a European, he finds all overt displays of nationalism suspect, which is fair.
Here in America, we have no such shame. We love patriotism like it’s a sport—loud, performative, and heavily sponsored by truck commercials. Even dyed-in-the-wool dissenters like me aren’t immune to the emotional charge of a freaking Sousa march. Sometimes I wonder: did all those years of daily Pledge recitation actually leave a mark? Did something seep in? Am I just now hitting that age when people start to drift conservative—not because they’re wise, but because they’re tired?
The U.S. doesn’t have a shared ancestry. We barely have a shared understanding of facts. So we cling to symbols—flags, anthems, marches, empty rituals we repeat until they feel like truth. Stars and Stripes Forever is our musical duct tape. It’s what holds this shaky project of a country together long enough to keep clapping.
And goddamn it, sometimes I still clap.
