The year after i was born, on Flag Day of 1954, the Pledge of Allegiance was altered to include the following bolded words:
"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."
One of my first memories of public school was learning the pledge which we faithfully recited first thing every class day. I never questioned God because no one around me did. It was hardly forced down my throat, it was merely an assumption of truth. So reciting the pledge meant absolutely nothing good or bad to me. It was just an accepted reality. Then a series of somethings happened.
At the time I was five, I was attending St. Andrews Lutheran church (ELCA), and the very first day of Sunday School I was shocked--and I mean that quite literally--to see a cross with a human man nailed to it. I was so upset I ran out of the room. When I got back home, I refused to return to the church (I did return a few years later). I cried. How could anyone do anything so terrible and why would someone do that? It was cruel. It was inhumane. It was just unspeakably horrible. You may laugh, but I had never seen a crucifix before. I was incredibly traumatized.
To me, that was God himself hanging there. The same God we pledged to. The same God used in the phrase, God damnit all. To say that I got mixed messages is an understatement. It was too hard to understand for me and so I became an agnostic, quit attending church and tried to think no more of it for five or so years.
But it got ever more difficult.
In the meantime, the Vietnam War moved ever closer to its apex. The February 1966 cover of Life magazine was gruesome if emotionally and intellectually stunning. Life followed with similar award winning photographs over a dozen or more months. Just months previous, I had penned a long anti-war poem in sixth grade. It was hung on the board for Open House and a parent protested it so strongly that they removed it. It was hard to understand then but looking back I have to smile at the fact that a sixth grader could so challenge the notion of a parent that my speech was stifled. In a sense, I had won.
My understandings of the war came largely from Walter Cronkite and the first televised coverage of a war. I often cried. It was so brutal. So inhumane. So torturous. So wrong.
But where I lived--in a very upper-middle-class white area full of John Birchers though my VERY republican family never succumbed to their dangerous nonsense even though I was sent home from public school with Birch Society literature in the sixth grade--there was little (open) dissent. If it was there, I never saw it and rarely heard it. The dissent I saw was on TV. The dissent I heard was in music. But that changed in 1965 and 1966 as I developed what became a lifetime of anti-war sentiment which, as I grew older, morphed into direct non-violet action.
And, as always, I looked to other places for thoughts on the matter. This 1965 Joan Baez version of Bob Dylan's brilliant song With God On Our Side summed up nicely the dissonance I was experiencing between war and God. I studied the lyrics for years, actually.
Prior to and during this time, of course, the Civil Rights movement crested. The brutality of that was often openly verbally supported in my home but the hatred hanging in the air said something very different. It was really about fear.
I found the movement necessary and support of the status quo unacceptable. Prior to this time, I was shuttled back and forth from Houston, Texas where I had a (to me beloved) "Mammy" (though that term was, at that time, consistently modified with the "N word" which I despised even then) to southern California. There were black and white drinking fountains. Black and white everythings. I hated Texas. I found the thinking I was constantly assaulted with evil and antithetical to everything in my heart and those around me I disliked every bit as much. Not to mention that I adored my Mammy. She was the only love I could find around me that wasn't spitting evil to its core. She was kind and loving if strict. She was an angel in a pit of vipers.
If nothing else, I was perceptive. I may not have understood the intellectual and political underpinnings of the Birch Society, communism or racism at 11 or 12, but my eyes and ears told me everything I really needed to know.
Then the Watts riot occurred in 1965. The hatred in my house increased to fever pitch. I just tried to avoid it until I got tired of it and began to openly dissent and confront it. I was 12, my mom was 52 the equivalent of my step dad a few years older. It didn't go well and there were a lot of arguments on everything from nuclear war to long hair. My family was not intellectually inclined rather what we would today think of as Fox News viewers. That probably sums it up pretty well.
And of course, the Vietnam War was killing more and more people daily for, as far as I could see, absolutely no palpable reason. The ideology I could understand surely could be settled in some other way than than shooting at one another, carpet bombing, and Agent Orangeing everything in sight. The anti-war/draft movement produced the first large uprisings on college campuses in 1965.
Interestingly, I attended war/draft protests the following year at 13 years old while our current GOP presidential contender was supporting the war and draft (which, of course, he avoided by going to France to convert people to his religion) at Stanford University at 19 years old. I find him just as hypocritical and disgusting now given, at the time, I had no idea who he was and really wouldn't have cared. I had just left the LDS church unable to reconcile its theology with reality and unwilling to accept the 'slavery' they encouraged me to adopt as a female. I had LDS members in my family, sacred garments, temple recommends and all. But I grew to disrespect the church and everything it stood for. It was Leave It To Beaver in an age of Woodstock. It was theological racism in an age of Dr. Martin Luther King. It was anti-tea in an age of LSD and pot. It was a culture of control in an era of freedom seeking and questioning. To me it was utter nonsense. And my many years of agostic/atheism began again.
I voted for the first time in 1972 and attended McGovern events prior. The assassinations of President Kennedy and Medgar Evers when I was ten, Malcom X when I was 12, Sen. Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King when I was 15 and the mother of Dr. King, Alberta Williams King, when I was 21 reinforced my belief about fear and hate and violence. It resonates to this day.
The bottom line for me was that almost everything i was taught was a lie. Land of the free? Equality? Liberty and justice for all? And all this under a God even then used to justify hatred and exclusion?
Today i wonder how anyone of that era could have turned out to be a republican or more astoundingly a right winger. They did, but I have no idea how. I was raised in a VERY right wing area but could see through it's Swiss cheese facade. It was riddled with what we call cognitive dissonance today. I don't know what it was called then.
I look at the political race before us and it really is a race about who we are as a people. The charitable, caring country or the "let em die" country. A country of justice and equality or a country of DOMA/DADT, birth certificates, Jim Crow and Anglo Saxons. A country of negotiation or shoot first ask questions later. A country of "we the people" or "you people".
I see today what I saw in the 50s and 60s. I thought we had settled this. We haven't.
**Thank you very much for the rescue! cany