“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Pledge of Allegiance by Francis Bellamy, as written in 1892.
When you attend as many municipal meetings as I do each month, you end up saying the Pledge of Allegiance many, many times.
You get to know where the American flag is located in every town hall.
I’m glad it’s there. And I’m glad we stand to recite the pledge before we get down to the mundane development of ordinances and often-rancorous input from the public.
It’s a reminder that we are all a part of something grander: one indivisible nation.
There have been revisions to this pledge through the years — four of them, in fact — but that was bound to happen. This is America, after all. We swear and shout and make our voices heard. Because it’s our right. We are lucky that way.
So as we celebrate Independence Day and as I sit through yet more angst-filled meetings embroiled with discussion of private vs. public beaches or fears of neighborhood sober homes, I think about how essential it is that we have a forum where we have an opportunity to remind our elected representatives that they work for us — all of us.
There’s a mental trick I play when I find myself cranky about missed deadlines, emptying the dishwasher or making yet another routine trip to the grocery store. I take a deep breath and visualize families carrying their most precious possessions as they walk miles to cross borders. I think about abandoned boats beached along our shoreline in the early hours of dawn. I think of hungry children huddled in refugee camps.
We laugh now about our mothers admonishing us to “think of all the starving children in Africa.” But our wise mothers were doing more than getting us to eat our vegetables, they were reminding us just how lucky we are to live in country with a pledge that concludes with the words, “with liberty and justice for all.”
— Mary Kate Leming,
Editor
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