The Pledge

Just finished watering the plants. Some leaves shading toward yellow but the afternoon showers have been enough to keep most things healthy.

Snitching on your neighbor is the main means of enforcing water conservation. The town has a tattletale website. Could've reported my neighbor but snitching is for prigs or people so damnably lonely that it is their only way of socializing.

Not that I'd ever win the Mr. Civic Virtue trophy. But the trap of selfishness is as good a summary of whats wrong with the world as I can think of.

I'm certainly not patriotic. The furor over the pledge reminded me that I stopped saying it at all in junior high school.

There was a girl who left home room every morning during the pledge. I think her relion forbade oaths. Maybe a Jehovah's Witness. I stayed in the room but didn't open my mouth. It wasn't that I despised the pledge. It struck me as hokey and silly.

My nationality seemed nothing more than a freak of fate. I didn't despise America but couldn't see preferring to be living hear than, say, Canada, Germany or France. Wanting to be a physicist I think I envied the USSR for the quality of their science education. (And hadn't a clue what life was like for the average soviet citizen.)

Democracy was just a means of letting morons elect morons as far as I could tell. Made as much sense as letting a blind man drive a car. I was an innocent little facsist. The only solution I could imagine was killing almost everybody everywhere.

Eventually I got out in the world and I read. And came to the inevitable conventional view that whatever democracies faults anything else was apt to be worse.

I think I had an anti-American phase. Wasn't for the usual reason for folks my age. Whatever opinion I had on the war in Vietnam I've long since forgotten.

It was the belief that Europeans were somehow smarter and more cultured than Americans. A trite rite of passage for bright young Americans.

I can't help but esteem countries like Holland and Germany more highly than the US. That is their lack of our unclean, insane sex laws compounded with ignorance of almost everything else.

Couldn't help but smile at the recent pledge furor. Laughing at the John & Jane Does who were upset is reflexive for me. But I don't care if the pledge says "under god" anymore than than I can that the bills in my pocket say "in god we trust."