Do Texans Say the Pledge of Allegiance?

1. Introduction.

I want to watch Governor Rick Perry of Texas say the Pledge of Allegiance. I want to watch his lips as he does. What does he do when he comes to the part about “indivisible”? Does he pronounce the word, or does he let his lips go slack in the moment that others affirm national unity?

Because Perry famously spoke about Texas seceding from the Union. I’m just asking – does he believe in the Pledge of Allegiance, or is it just a ritual to him, like saying “bless you” when somebody sneezes?

2. A lot of talk.

In fact, it’s not just Governor Perry. It’s others, too. It’s still possible to find un-interred bones at Gettysburg, but some people will not shut up.

3. Pious rhetoric?

But I don’t want to be shallow or pious. Maybe I should ask – maybe we all should ask for ourselves – what it would take for my fidelity and my country to part ways. How far would the government have to go? I would be aghast if the government shuttered basic freedoms, like the right to vote or the right to a jury of one’s peers. I would be stricken if the government killed peaceful protesters.

4. Past and future.

But if these things alone made me stop being a stakeholder in my country, my allegiance would have left already. In 1970, Ohio Army National Guard troops at Kent State killed peaceful protesters. And southern states in times past denied African Americans the right to vote and the right to sit on juries. The South routinely, if grudgingly, conceded civil rights to persons of color only when forced to by federal law – federal law that the federal government had means to enforce. The cure for these ills was not insurrection; it was the rule of law.

But what if America became like a Phillip K Dick dystopia? What if freedoms were widely withheld? Or if one power so dominated media or means of income that democracy became farcical – like nominally-democratic modern Venezuela? How far could a moral person go to oppose such a government?

5. History’s (partial) answer.

History hints at an answer in the lives of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. These heroes changed history through self-sacrifice.  In advancing their beliefs, they did not make others pay what they themselves were unwilling to pay. They paid with imprisonment. Some of their followers, and Dr. King himself, paid with their lives. It is powerful to lay down your life or liberty for your beliefs. And willingness to pay a high price gives those beliefs authenticity and legitimacy.

So you could argue that a moral person could go as far as the self-sacrificing practices of these heroes of non-violence.  And to embrace suffering like they did confers legitimacy on a cause.

This willingness to embrace suffering is at least a partial answer.  It distinguishes Gandhi, King, and Mandela from a Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, who shifted the burden of his beliefs to innocent victims.

6. Righteous murder?

But willing suffering, even willing death, is no perfect gage of the worth of the cause or the rightness of the act. If it were, it would legitimize suicide bombers.

Looking at Gandhi, King, and Mandela, those apostles of non-violence, and looking at the Timothy McVeighs of the world, and their murder and mayhem, maybe the moral is that murder is always a mistake.  To quote Gandhi, "I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill."  Self-sacrifice and non-violence in this concept are inseparable.

But what about Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian. He was a pacifist, and he planned to study non-violence under Gandhi. But he felt called to endure World War II with his countrymen, so he returned to Germany from his place of safety in New York.

But Bonhoeffer could not bear what he found in Germany. This pacifist was so tormented by the slaughter of the Jews that he put aside his pacifism and plotted to kill Hitler. The plot failed, and Bonhoeffer’s part was discovered. He was arrested and hanged.

Though the plot failed, it is hard to say that Bonhoeffer was wrong to join it. But what guiding principle informs a would-be assassin about what camp he belongs in: whether he is, on the one hand, a Bonhoeffer? Or whether he is, on the other hand, a John Wilkes Booth; Charles J. Guiteau; Gavrilo Princip; Carl Austin Weiss; Lee Harvey Oswald; James Earl Ray; Sirhan Sirhan; John Hinckley, Jr.; Ali Agca; Khalid Ahmed Showky Al-Islambouli; Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme; Timothy McVeigh; Yigal Amir; the 9/11 plotters; Richard Reid; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; or Nidal Malik Hasan? All thought they did right. But political murder is more often planned or perpetrated by the wicked or the insane than by the good. We must reckon with that truth as a practical consequence of approving, even theoretically, violence against government.

This is particularly true in these times. Incendiary vogue words such as “tyrant” and “socialist” are exploited to incite voters, but they also lodge in fanatical minds and lead to fanatical plots. One hears of Second Amendment solutions, from a speaker who’s grudge is that she opposes the enacted policy of the elected majority. I have heard that there are more death threats against our present President than any other.

7. Conclusion.

This meditation un-eases me. What permits me to publish it is only that it’s highly, highly hypothetical. America shows no signs of becoming unrecognizably evil. If it ever did, I hope that I would do right.

Maybe, in the end, in large matters and small, all we can do is act on our best judgment, and hope that it is sound.

That’s as far as I take this mediation today. It’s not an answer. Maybe some questions are best left padlocked in a basement chest.

This essay is grimmer at the end than it was at the beginning. But it did start with talk of secession. Talk of secession led to our nation’s bloodiest toll of death. So if the grim direction of this essay was not inevitable from its beginning, neither was it unpredictable.