Pledging Allegiance

[I'm working in the youth camp post, don't worry.]

Part of Mom's "4th of July Patriotic Program" for the late afternoon/evening of said holiday was all of us standing out on the front patio and saying the pledge of allegiance as we faced the flag hanging outside our door. This physical ritual stirred me to actually consider the words I was speaking as I held my right hand over my heart. I don't want to go on and on about this, attempting to extract deep indicting meaning from an epiphanaical personal experience, but I do think it is interesting, beneficial, and a bit shocking to think of what you're saying and doing when you pledge your allegiance to the flag.

Committing yourself to this nation is not a meaningless patriotic apple pie starry-eyed anachronistic ritual. As I said those words I thought of all the things I despise in America--all the goverment officials, offices, practices and problems I have hated and despaired over, all the things that rankle me in the great swarming creature that is the goverment of the United States. I was pledging allegiance to that.
I was promising to support and ally myself with that one ship in the global sea. So much of geopolitics is taken for granted in my mind that country borders seem more like relics of the past that happen to be how we distribute the colors in our World Atlases. However, even as communications technology and force-fed cultural appreciation make the globe seem like one big college campus, there is a kernel of a NATION that remains, and I held my hand over my heart, faced the flag that represents that nation, and pledged my allegiance to it.
It's not as drastically and personally applicable as a marraige vow, but philosophically, it's no less serious. And it sobered me as the words came out of my mouth. Think of them not as pre-existing words like a poem or a saying, but rather speak them as though you yourself were saying them from your own mind and mindset:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States of America
And to the republic for which it stands
One nation under God
Indivisible
With liberty and justice for all.

I really don't know what to think about most of America, internally or externally, but I've pledged her my allegiance, and however that shakes out in the future, I've committed to that.

--Clear Ambassador