I Pledge Allegiance

My years at college were wonderful, full of all the socializing and learning that are expected from years of unsupervised growing up.

I learned most of what I knew about campus life from movies, and what movies told me was, when you want to study you need to pick an interesting and mentally motivating location to study. At my school it was the Hall of Flags. Along with being known as a prime place for picking up on individuals of the opposite sex, it was also where, hanging from both sides for a length of over 100 yards were stadium flags representing every nation in the world. The flagpoles out front bore the flags of the nation, the state and the school, but within the hall of flags you could sit for hours studying the symbols of passion and devotion held by people whose passions and devotions are completely different than your own.
College is a funny place. After three years of school students who have recently began to accept that maybe their parents didn’t know everything finally begin to think that their parents knew nothing, abandoning, for a short time, all previously held notions and ideas. This has brought many a college junior to the brink of communism or anarchy, and is, of course, the short-lived effect of trading one parental teaching figure for another.
While in the midst of this upheaval, a fellow student noted the supposed lunacy of pledging allegiance to a flag, which he said was the effect of blind and ignorant nationalism. I supposed if a person’s allegiance was to the physical flag itself that would be silly, but when it represents allegiance to the most fundamental moral ideals of that nation, it represents a national identity and a national standard. When I think of the moral ideals of this nation, I am led to believe that pledging allegiance to those ideals can only be a good thing.
When I see the flag flying from any flagpole or when I see stadium flags lining the entrance to some grand arena I hope that the people of all those nations are pledging allegiance to their grandest and loftiest ideals.