average american's reaction when someone doesnt want to be forced to worship a piece of cloth and a god they don't believe in every morning, and get berated if they dont lmfao. home of the free, right?
I grew up in Florida and Tennessee in the 80s and 90s. It was definitely a daily thing, but very lax enforcement and I don't know that anybody would have made a huge stink about it even then. The duck and cover "tornado" drills were very real and very serious though.
We only had one teacher tell us we were required to (we were standing up just kinda mumbling it), the following class everyone just stayed seated and at least 3 of us had printouts in our backpacks confirming that it was a violation of the first amendment to require it.
He didn't even acknowledge it, knowing that teacher I imagine he looked it up right after and realized he was wrong.
We eventually resumed standing up but hands at our sides and silent.
Edit: if this is showing up as a reply to another comment, it was supposed to be a top level comment to the OP. Some weird stuff keeps happening with my comments but I'm not sure if it's just visual.
It was tacked on in the 50s (note how it kinda messes with the cadence) because of godless commies. There have been other little tweaks as well, some making it worse (e.g. "under god") and some better (abandoning the, herrrm, "Roman" salute). While always a bit weirdly nationalistic, the core of the modern pledge was written by a Christian Socialist and replaced one that was worse and more explicitly religious.
I guess it's not so weird that it exists and I assume many countries have some sort of boilerplate loyalty oath they can bust out as needed, but it's pretty messed up that it's mandatory for kids on a daily basis and fetishizes the flag as an object. I am quite fond of my country, and I think there are a lot of worse places to live, but our history is pretty messed up and our views on what exactly constitutes freedom and democracy are not unquestionable just because some clever provincial elites came up with a halfway workable system in the late 1700s. I suppose it's marginally better to build a national cult out of institutions and symbols than individuals, but it's still a terrible idea to treat patriotism like religious dogma.
Yes, I did. I didn't think anything about it at the time, but as an adult is seems weird, and like someone else said cultish. Yet, I am conflicted, because one of my concerns about the USA is increasing partisanship driven diverging cultures. Having kids say the pledge of allegiance is generally unoffensive, especially when compared to our ongoing culture wars.
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