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

Early on, at five or six or seven we learn the words by rote not by heart, they never make it there, but by head, by the placement of the tongue against our teeth. We are parrots before patriots. There are no conscientious objectors, we have yet to learn either word much less the meanings of the two in tandem, the possible consequences of the combination. Not that we necessarily understand the word liberty or the word justice either. If this chant is our only context, we may never learn the meanings of these words in a country where we are free to spend our entire lives in front of the TV digesting the media's sex and violence, taking it into our bodies without question, the way we took in the patriotic pledge in our elementary classrooms. And as long as we walk continually through our lives without questioning the words, the mold isn't confining. Only when we try to step outside the images the TV feeds us do we realize that liberty and justice for all might not apply to us.