Re: oaths of loyalty vs. oths of fealty

[Alys of Foxdale <foxdale@wolfstar.com>]

Poster: Alys of Foxdale <foxdale@wolfstar.com>

Miriam Rachel bat Mordecai said:

[Alfredo and Alys wrote about the way the Pledge of Allegiance is
pretty meaningless to children when the words are first taught to
them.]

> Sorry to hear it was meaningless to y'all.....it always held deep meaning for 
> me as a child, but then I grew up in Texas, so maybe things were different in 
> the way we were taught about it.
> 
> Miri (the REAL Miriam this month)

Miri, I have always highly respected your intelligence -- if you were
able fully to comprehend the Pledge of Allegiance at age 6, I must add
to that respect!

When the words are taught in first grade or so, they hold less than no
meaning to the children who learn them.  Most children simply do not
have the capacity to understand abstracts like that until much later.
In fact, most children do not even have many of those words in their
vocabularies yet!

But once they have matured enough to understand what the words mean,
the Pledge is well and truly memorized and can be contemplated in
depth.

And someone also wrote to me privately:

> If this pledge holds no meaning for you, why are you still in the United
> States?

You have completely missed the point!  Just because someone avers he
didn't understand something as a child does not mean he doesn't
understand as an adult.

For that matter, why on earth would anyone leave the country just
because he didn't understand the Pledge of Allegiance?  That would
only be an obvious thing to do if one both understood and *disagreed*
with the Pledge!

   Alys of Foxdale        | Vert, on a fess between three trees
foxdale@wolfstar.com      |     argent, a fox passant gules.


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