"I pledge allegiance to the flag..."

I pledge allegiance to a flag? to a scrap of cloth? to an object? to a symbol? No.

Do Christians worship the cross? No. They worship the man/god for which the cross stands. In a similar way, let us pledge allegiance to the thing that the symbol stands for:

I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Better. But doesn't that "under God" bit violate the 1st amendment? Isn't that an insult to atheists and polytheists?

I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Even better. But what if the government of the United States does something bad? Like sending Japanese-Americans to concentration camps during WWII? Or just starts locking up citizens without due process?

Now that I think about it, I don't want to promise to follow the rest of my nation all of the time. They're a bunch of idiots. But there's a reason I'm still living here. I like many of the ideas on which our nation was founded: all men should be treated equally, and should be given the rights of life, liberty, and property.

I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, as long as it upholds the ideals of liberty and justice for all.

Or more simply,

I pledge allegiance to the notion of liberty and justice for all.

"I pledge allegiance to the notion of liberty and justice for all" E2 Writeup, Copyright 2002 Frank Grimes.

This writeup is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5. (For details, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ ) Alternatively, permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2. (For details, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html)

--Frank Grimes, 2007

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