Last month little Brianna Fischer of Cobble Hill was watching a television program in which children recited the Pledge of Allegiance in a classroom. What was this mysterious jingoistic incantation, Brianna asked her parents, who were shocked to learn that their 8-year-old daughter was not required to swear an oath to the flag every morning at PS 29. Empire State law requires students from Plattsburgh to Dunkirk to declare their allegiance daily, and so Brianna's parents marched right down to PS 29 to set that hippie principal straight.
"I was shocked that she didn't know the pledge," Brianna's father Joe Fischer, a firefighter, tells the Daily News. "I thought she'd been doing it in school." After "spirited" meetings with teachers and parents, principal Melanie Woods agreed to broadcast the pledge over the school's public address system.
But does that go far enough? There is a loophole in state law that says students can't be forced to recite it. "The bottom line is we don't want children to feel uncomfortable about their decision to say it or to refrain from saying it," says Woods. "It's a huge teachable moment." The Obamaism is telling, because some critics wonder if our current President is really allied with the U.S. flag, or with Kenya or with the flag of the Muslim caliphate (do they have one?).
One area mom tells the tabloid, "I know the phrase 'under God' is what gets people's panties in a bunch, but we need to keep instilling in our kids what makes our country so great." And nothing celebrates our greatness better than vague, ahistorical platitudes about liberty and justice! After all, if we don't teach children to identify themselves with our nationalist symbols, how will they know who to go to war for when they grow up?
