What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

cloudchasersakonige-deactivated asked: That post about the military. Most I can understand, but how is teaching kids the Star Spangled Banner and the Pledge of Allegiance recruiting for the military? I grew up going to private schools before high school, they taught us the anthem and the pledge and there was NO military recruiter presence in those schools

I honestly don’t know what post you’re referring to, sorry - was it something I reblogged a while ago? Either way, I’m Australian, not American, so even if you dig it up, I’m probably not going to be the best person to ask, on account of how I find the whole concept of the Pledge of Allegiance really fucking creepy. Like, other countries don’t have those? It’s not normal in a democracy for school kids to have to stand up at the start of the day and pledge their patriotic allegiance to god, the flag and the country, and especially not when there’s meant to be a separation of church and state, but kids get penalised for refusing to join in anyway? Plus, I mean, the American national anthem - which I’ve been hearing a fair bit lately, on account of having discovered ice hockey and the NHL - is basically a song about how war is awesome.

So inasmuch as I’m capable of answering your question without referring to whatever post actually prompted it, from my outsider perspective, American patriotism is traditionally and routinely expressed in a bunch of highly militaristic ways, especially through your war-anthem and your super creepy pledge, so that even if neither thing is overtly presented as part of A Reason To Join The Army, those things in combination are still subconsciously training you to value military service as The Purest Form Of Patriotism. Like, most other countries are not as nuts about their actual physical flags as the US is? We don’t put them in classrooms, we don’t pledge ourselves to them, and we don’t go into frothing apoplexy about the metaphorical disrespect done to the concept of a flag by kneeling during the national anthem, not least because, in Australia, half of us don’t even know the words to it in the first place.

(Although, that being said, Australia can still be pretty fucking racist, so if black and brown athletes started taking a knee over here, I guarantee some people would try to make disrespecting the flag a dogwhistle, too. It just wouldn’t be as successful an argument, because they’d get the piss taken out of them for it.)  

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