Musings - on the editor’s mind

Last week’s editorial offered excerpts from foundational American documents, the bedrock that we stand on as citizens, as Americans. The pledge of allegiance is not codified – it is not legislation. Yet more citizens probably say it more often in more government halls, schools, fire stations, churches and stadiums than any single American document.

Here is a fact: It was written by Francis Bellamy, a minister and socialist.

I printed the preamble to the Constitution and the presidential and congressional oaths of office. As I have written before, all our elected officials, including our town councils and school boards, swear to defend the Constitution as part of their oaths. People entering the military and police and fire departments take oaths to defend the Constitution. This happens all across the country.

Many of us have been in the school board room or Maple Hall reciting the pledge before the start of a meeting. Many of us have family or friends who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution as officeholders or first responders. That is the common ground we stand on, defending the rule of law based on the Constitution. That is the bedrock of patriotism.

Patriots do not let patriots storm the nation’s or any state’s capital or government building. Caring citizens counsel their fellow citizens against bringing weapons to rallies and protests.

Past editorials have emphasized people’s right to believe what they want, true or not. Here is something I now believe: people who call themselves patriots and say they revere the flag and follow the Constitution are not telling the truth. How do you explain patriots beating police officers with a flag pole attached to an American flag? My fellow patriots cannot engage in an insurrection against Congress or support, defend or condone that insurrection and call it saving or defending the Constitution.

Just as it is impossible to be in two places at once, it is difficult to make two opposing facts true. How can patriots simultaneously salute the flag, use it as a weapon to break into the nation’s Capitol and uphold the Constitution?

We are citizens of this country. How can people who attack the elected government to overthrow it be patriots? That action defines that old, 18th century guys in white-powdered wig’s word, sedition.

Anyone can wave and stand for and salute the flag. But any citizen who is partial, picking the sections and amendments of the Constitution they approve, or championing parts of our history while denying and ignoring other historical facts, is at best a partial American. We are then not standing on common ground.

We are the United States of America. If we are not all in it together then some of us are out, by definition.

So anyone taking and keeping parts of the Constitution and not holding all the other parts can do that, but they cannot take the American part or the flag. No. In making the choice to be partial, they are seceding. That is another old word meaning they are leaving the United States for a separate, different country.

I have four siblings. I have had real and deep differences with some of them. I have never thought to quit or disown my family. We work things out. We stay together, as a whole.

If people want a different country, they can start one. But trying to overthrow the elected government of the United States is worse than a bad idea. It is un-American. It is unpatriotic.