Loyalty Oath Coercion Deemed Inappropriate at School District
Follow Up Friday: we look back on previous stories; what's happened after our spotlight shined on it? If there was a problem identified, has it been solved? Has there been no change and the amount of elapsed time made the issue newsworthy again by virtue of that fact? Look to Follow Up Friday to wrap it all up or to highlight for us all how lame our city can be. First it was the Emeryville City Council meetings, and now it's the Emery School Board meetings: it seems a wave of godless communism has washed over our city. Or non-divisive rational politics.
A spokesperson from the Emery Unified School District who wishes anonymity reports that Superintendent John Rubio and Board President Donn Merriam have decided the loyalty oath known as the Pledge of Allegiance has no place at School Board meetings and it's been quietly dropped.
Long Time Coming
After decades of dutifully administering the Pledge before meetings, suddenly the Board announced they would consider eliminating the controversial religious and robotic loyalty oath in 2011 after parents complained. At the time, then Board President Josh Simon told the Tattler he expected they would eventually remove the Pledge agenda item from meetings but cautioned it would take "more than a month or two" of deliberations.
The Tattler long made hay of the mindless recital of the Pledge, noting it had the effect of cancelling out a self stated School District goal that students learn critical thinking skills. It was an argument that parents took up, several making their views known to the Board. In the end, the Board deliberations, if they even occurred, stretched on for six more years before they dropped the god and country 'right or wrong' trope and succumbed to rationality based non-divisive meetings earlier this month.
The City Council voted to remove the loyalty oath from public meetings in January after years of cajoling from the Tattler. It's noteworthy and likely telling the Council finally took action on this fake patriotism right before President Trump took office, avoiding the unseemly spectacle of Emeryville City Council members effectively pledging their loyalty to Donald Trump.
Watching their lips closely over the last few years, it became more and more obvious that neither the City Council members nor the Board members themselves were actually verbalizing the Pledge after they had been asking the public to "stand and join" them each time.
Emeryville Patriotism in the Age of Trump Publicly Administered Loyalty Oath At City Hall Should Exit With Trump's Entrance
Opinion "I pledge allegiance to the United States...". "Without benefit of critical thinking, I swear my loyalty"- how's that sound, especially now that Donald Trump will wield near supreme power? How about, "No matter what Donald Trump has planned for us, I pledge my allegiance to him". How's that sound? Those stand-in pledges can now be construed to be at the black heart of the Pledge of Allegiance, an un-American loyalty oath wherein the speaker unthinkingly gives up his or her own agency to do the bidding of the federal government (and by extension, its executive). Starting on January 20th the beneficiary of that bidding has a new neo-fascist face most Emeryville residents will be uncomfortable with.
The American loyalty oath, before bootcamp-like in its coercive adherence, now suddenly seems positively Pyongyang-like.
The eagle wants us to make a pledge of allegiance: to ban pesticides and end habitat destruction.
That is unless the Emeryville City Council does its patriotic duty and dispels with the public administering of the Pledge of Allegiance before every Council meeting; something they have pledged, so to speak, to consider at the Council meeting on January 17th.
A change in how our local government sanctifies its democratic legitimacy is shaping up. Mayor Scott Donahue is directing the Council to consider all manner of loyalty oath Pledge replacement possibilities to satisfy the function of bringing the community together at public City Council meetings including the singing of the Woody Guthrie classic 'This Land is Your Land' and/or the public recital of Walt Whitman poetry. It represents an important shift away from the banal provincialism of Emeryville reliant on kitsch sophistry as it is to a more aspirational civic engagement as it could be.
Many towns in the Bay Area don't do the loyalty pledge before their public meetings. Indeed, there's no law saying the oath must be administered, so why do we do it? We can see plenty that's put at risk by administering the oath but nothing that can be gained that couldn't be gained by a less authoritarian and demanding avowal such as the populist unifying hosannas from Mr Guthrie or Mr Whitman.
“May we think of freedom,
not as the right to do as we please,
but as the opportunity to do what is right.”
- Walt Whitman
Besides the oath being un-American, we've noticed the City Council, while asking us to join them in reciting the oath, don't like to say it themselves. Even former Councilwoman Nora Davis (how we love to say that), the premier conservative on the Council, stood silently as do her colleagues whenever the oath is being administered. It is the crowd in the Council chambers, cowed as they are, that freely give away their agency hands on hearts and sign on to relinquishing their critical thinking rights so wantonly as they speak the words. The hypocrisy of this Council on this score has been blinding; if you're going to ask us to say the pledge, don't you think at least you yourself should say it, City Council?
Under God Kicked to the curb: Jesus wants us to continue praising him at City Hall.
Nonetheless, now it would seem, those days are behind us. We like the Mayor's idea especially of having the community unite in song with the palliative effects brought on from This Land is Your Land with its Trump-canceling collectivist vision of our community and country. This will likely get the right wing all agog and agitated, a nice side benefit.
The Council will also consider various non-theocratic pledges, for instance from a contest held by TheHumanist however inspiring as some may be, those represent just more of the same; a pledge. The government should not ask our community to pledge it anything. Loyalty is to be earned, not coerced. We urge the Council to reject the Pledge of Allegiance being replaced with another pledge, even one that kicks Jesus to the curb.
We hope this City Council rejection of the American loyalty oath will spill over to the School District where it's needed at least as much as at City Hall. We have long been agitating against the Council led administrating of the McCarthyist loyalty oath especially at the School Board meetings. How blinkered is it we have to ask, that the School District spends so much time teaching the value of critical thinking skills to the students only to subvert that message every School Board meeting when everyone enters collective amnesia and again nearly on automatic, goes through the anti-critical saccharine display of phony rectitude and piety. Back in the dark days of 2011, the School Board was on the verge of dispensing with the loyalty oath but reactionary forces rose up to make sure the District stayed on the straight and narrow with God and country.
It shouldn't take the terrifying idea of President Trump to spur the City Council into action on this and we're not sure if that's indeed what was instrumental in their turn around; really it doesn't matter. We just welcome rationality in association with public policy at City Hall and we applaud the Council for this symbolic but still important rejection of heretofore unneeded and unhelpful nonsense.
We're a community here that has allegiances we'd like to proclaim, yes, but we're a community that has allegiance to redwood forests, gulf stream waters and the collectivist idea that the land was made for you and me.
Opinion
Want to hear something un-American?
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands."
Who would seriously make this pledge? It's a loyalty oath and it's un-American (ironically).
Let's tell it like it is: it's an unconditional pledge of allegiance regardless of any action or policy on the part of the country. It's anti-democratic at its heart. It's "my country, right or wrong" and it's being foisted upon our children at Emery schools.
The same school district, Emery Unified, that claims to put a high value on teaching children critical thinking skills over rote memory skills or even propaganda, is the same district that is leading this pledge by coercion every morning (in some classes). In case any children fail to get the message they must be loyal to America and take a loyalty oath at school, it's also repeated at School Board meetings. They see it at City Council meetings.
The oath tells students to dispense with critical thinking and have faith in America. Everything their teachers taught them about how to think critically is not really something they need to do. It suggests if students see something not right with the country, they are to turn their eyes away and just be loyal instead. Most children are probably able to simply mouth the words every morning without attaching any meaning to it. But why are we asking our school children to do that?
Even at their World War ll concentration camps, Japanese American children were coerced into taking the loyalty oath.
California public schools are required to teach a few minutes of "patriotism" everyday. That law was likely concocted years ago to push school children to recite the loyalty oath every day without directly forcing it. But the recitation of this oath isn't patriotic. It's actually un-patriotic because it tears down the democratic structures that buoy the country up and make it viable; able to work for the average person.
Better, Emeryville schools could satisfy Sacramento's patriotism requirement by teaching a different Article of the Constitution every day or something equally valuable. Students should know about this loyalty oath, the history of it, perhaps they could critically explore the corrosive nature of it, they just shouldn't be coerced to actually take the oath themselves. If parents or guardians find value in forcing their children to take the oath, they can do that outside of school.
Publicly administered loyalty oaths are off the table in a free country....or should be. America is fine without its citizens relinquishing their own agency by taking such oaths. It's strong enough as it is without having to coerce children (or even adults) to suspend their ability to think critically and promise to be loyal without condition. Never mind all the clap-trap about "under God" added in the 1950's, the first sentence of this oath is bad enough; it fulfills any definition of a loyalty oath.
The power elite should always be scared that the people will not be loyal to a system that does not benefit them. The power elite, the plutocrats in the country, those who benefit from the status quo, have interest in average people taking this loyalty oath to heart. It asks average people, those who make the status quo possible, to no longer be agents for their own interests.
People should only have allegiance to their country insofar as their country has allegiance to them and their interests. If the country is working for the average American, then they should support it. If it stops working for the average American, they should stop supporting it. Rather, they should confront it and force change. Change is not loyalty.
People should never give their allegiance away so cheaply. And we should not ask our school children to do it.
