Things I love and hate about the USA

USAmerican stuff i love (and miss):
- american eagle
- aeropostale
- white castle
- five guys
- baby ruth
- reece's pieces
- lucky charms
- cinamon toast crunchies
- hershey's kisses chocolate meltables
- pancakes!
- mini peanut butter cups
- central park
- cold stone creamery
- Episcopal church
- summer camp
- sections of society in which drunkeness is not expected in students
- slightly lax following of car insurance laws
- that one pizza place in Boston - Crazy Dough's
- San Francisco... just, everything
- lightning bugs
- 30C summer temperatures in Ohio
- air con
- waffle sticks
- philly cheese steaks
- space
- turtles
- back decks
- frozen yoghurt
- respect for veterans
- Christian music on the radio... most of the time (sometimes it's just annoying and/or weird)
- Dunkin' Donuts - hot chocolate fixed my life on a rainy Boston day
- cinnamon raisin bagels (cept I don't really miss them as I can get them in the UK)
- tiny little super cheap cinemas
- little girls telling me about all the queens of england - there's the old one... um, shes called elizabeth, and victoria... and ummm... the one with red hair. Very cute.


USAmerican stuff you can keep:
- the 'socialism = evil' mentality
- foxnews
- full size peanut butter cups
- bloomingdale's
- buffalo wild wings
- 2nd amendment
- mcdonalds (except mcflurries)
- healthcare system (as it currently stands)
- creationism
- the ex-gay movement
- unecessarily huge cars
- weird Daddy long leg spiders
- weight in pounds... dudes - stones exist for a reason, use them!
- temperature in farenheight (the one thing I could never quite work out how to quickly convert from)
- plastic cheese. the word cheddar should not be allowed to describe it
- mixed savoury/ sweet breakfasts
- root beer
- ice tea. I may not like the real stuff, but it is still the real stuff
- 'town centers' that are a series of unconnected shops each surrounded by its own car park
- putting peoples' marriages to public vote - way to (not) be civilised, USA!
- 100 years old making something historical
- flimsy paper social security cards
- 'i could care less'... so... you do care about it then?! I think what you're trying to say is 'I couldn't care less'
- adding tax to the price on the label (i dont care if it varies by state, its annoying)
- Sarah Palin (I would recommend a locked room as the best place to keep her)
- obesity - we really don't need any more of it
- Hannah Montana
- smart carts at airports - why are they not free?!
- Al-uuum-in-um..... dudes, its Al-u-min-ee-um - check the spelling: Al-u-min-i-um. If you must corrupt the English language, at least do it in a logical way.


Apologies for it starting rather material, and only occasionally getting deeper from there!

Why I won't be making the pledge of Allegiance

"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"

Spending 8 weeks at summer camp this year, I had plenty of opportunities to stand and watch the flag of the USA go up and down the flag pole – all through orientation week (for 'practice') and then 5 week-long camps. Right off the bat us internationals were reassured we weren't expected to recite the pledge, just to stand quietly and respect the ceremony of the flag raising. At the beginning of summer I was pleased – I didn't want to essentially pledge myself to a foreign nation, but as the summer wore on my reasons for objecting to the pledge changed. I found myself in a situation where I would be happy to pledge allegiance to the USA – after all, I was not required to put myself in a monogamous relationship with her (Britain was always going to be my first love). However, without rewording the pledge somewhat, there was no way I would say it (and I was not going to require any of my girls to do so either – if they wanted to just stand there quietly I wasn't going to stop them).

My objections to the pledge basically split into two main points (although I can see why agnostics/ atheists might not be big fans of the 'under God' bit – interestingly it's insertion is the most modern change to the pledge, dating from 1954. So much for separation of church and state). The first is fairly trivial – pledge allegiance to a flag? For real? Like – a piece of fabric flag? Yeah, I get that it represents the country and all that, but seriously, would it not have been more straightforward to just jump right into the 'Republic' bit. No? Maybe I just haven't understood it right...

Second, and more seriously – the end part ('indivisible, with liberty and justice for all'). I don't like this one bit, and I like young children being instructed to recite it on a regular basis even less. To any but the most oblivious of people, it is obvious that the USA is not 'indivisible', and it certainly does not have 'liberty and justice for all'. Last time I checked, there were pretty serious divisions between Democrats and Republicans, or Liberals and Conservatives (there is of course a difference). Then there's Native Americans vs. Caucasians vs. ethnic minorities, so called 'immigrants' vs. 'real' USAmericans, those accepting of LGBT people vs. those not, Christians vs. Muslims. I use 'vs.' not to suggest battles between these groups, although there often are, but simply that there are unavoidable deep divisions. It does not seem like an 'indivisible' nation when there are still segregated proms¹, around 30% of the population in summer 2008 thinking immigration is bad for the country², and official policy that allowing LGBT service people to be open would 'create an unacceptable risk to the armed forces’ high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion '³. Similarly, I am not willing to profess that the USA offers 'liberty and justice for all', when I don't believe this is true. 15.3% of USAmericans had no health insurance at some point in 2007⁴ (to be fair, hopefully this will soon change). Only 21 states out of 50 prohibit an employer from firing someone purely because of their sexual orientation (we won't even mention gender identity, needless to say its even worse),⁵ while only 14 prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing.⁶ To me, this isn't 'liberty and justice' for all.

As far as I'm concerned, the real problem is not that the pledge of allegiance does not seem to have all the facts about the USA, but that in public schools, and summer camps all over the country the pledge is part of the daily routine, with children from a young age encouraged if not required to take part. Geeky metaphor for the effect of this: I learnt when I was very young that all objects have a weight in grams, which doesn't change. Then I went to school and was advised that this is really 'mass', and weight is something different. Then I got to the last few years of school and was told that, much to my surprise, mass is not fixed, and goes pretty haywire when an object gets near to the speed of light. So now I find myself in a situation where although I remember what I've been taught, I fundamentally see grams/ pounds as a measure of weight, and see this quality as unchanging. Now back to the pledge: if you have been declaring every day since you were in kindergarten that the USA is 'indivisible' and has 'liberty and justice for all', no matter how much evidence to the contrary you then gather, instinct will still tell you that there's nothing wrong with the country. And when instinct tells you there's nothing wrong, it's going to take quite something to persuade you that change is needed. Health care reform? No need, there's 'liberty and justice for all' in our country! Now, I'll give you, this sounds a lot like brainwashing. I'm not saying it is – every single one of the millions reciting the pledge every morning is perfectly capable of making their own decisions. What I am saying is that the default opinion can easy become 'we don't need change', and personally I think it's better to come from a place of not knowing whether change is needed. When new legislation is proposed, just as much as those in favour should have to show why it is good, those advocating the status quo should have to demonstrate why it is acceptable. It's precisely for this reason that I don't like it when people say we should act in a certain way 'because it's how it's always been done'... but that's going off on a tangent more than a little.

So... a pledge which ignores the considerable proportion of USAmericans who do not believe in a God, is made to a pretty piece of cloth rather than the actual country, is really pretty factually incorrect and potentially primes a nation against the correction of injustices. Maybe I'm overreacting, but I won't be making the pledge of allegiance any time soon. Nor will I require or encourage a child to make it. At least not until the new edition comes out.

1http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24prom-t.html

2http://www.pollingreport.com/immigration.htm

3http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/10/654.html#b

4http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf

5http://community.pflag.org/Page.aspx?pid=1190

6http://www.hrc.org/issues/5499.htm