When I was first taught to memorize and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I neither knew what “pledge” nor “allegiance” meant. They were empty, formless words, meaningful to me only because they appeared meaningful to my teacher and my classmates. It’s worth noting (as humbly as possible, I promise) that I always outpaced those classmates during reading lessons, so it’s safe to assume that they didn’t know what they were saying either. But still, there we stood, all simultaneously standing and clutching our hearts as a show of respect to something which we scarcely had the capacity to understand.
As time passed and our vocabularies grew, our pledge and our allegiance began to make sense—we lived in the greatest country in the world. How fortunate! According to our elders, administrators, and educational materials, we lived in the one and only Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, the great Uniter, the great Liberator! No nation on God’s earth could come anywhere near our magnificence, nor our ceaseless, selfless magnanimity. Of course we should stand and salute our beautiful flag each morning. That was merely the least we could do, given all that Old Glory had done and would continue to do for us.
But some of us began to grow skeptical. As our youthful idealism and impressionability began to fade, it was slowly replaced by a grittier, more complex frame of mind. What was once an inviolably colorful and bountiful idyll became, for some, the seedy, monochromatic remains of a dream just woken up from. For a still smaller sect of us, it became a jeremiad. The national narrative started to seem little more than a fairytale; at best, an optimistic but very distant goal. We’d reached a crossroads, the intersecting paths being our foundational folklore and what the untouched statistics have to say about it.
Americans who exist in societal margins—whether due to their race, class, sex, sexuality, etc.—tend to reach this crossroads more quickly and reliably than others. Their rose-colored glasses aren’t quite as durable as the leading brand. Still, even though they have a head start, anyone can arrive at the same destination. We’re all versed in the same cultural mythology irrespective of the respective subcultures we inhabit. Because of this, we all possess the agency with which one could question the legitimacy of that mythology. We can all choose whether or not to believe our own stories.
It is in understanding this that we might understand what is at the root of our most pressing national questions. True, our divisions appear to grow more complex and unbridgeable by the day. We seem to be constantly breaking new ground on just how differently citizens of the same country can see that country. We seek to lighten this sociocultural burden through political pronouncements, legislation, and even direct, violent action—in other words, the old methods. Perhaps they will one day prove effective, but perhaps the core of our issues is infinitely simpler. Perhaps it all comes down to which story we believe, and, resultantly, which one we tell.
Featured image/photo courtesy of iStock.