I will not fly a flag tomorrow on Independence day.
I will not sing of America's greatness.
I will not recite the Pledge of allegiance or sing the National Anthem .
Instead, I will celebrate that I am now a citizen of the world and dedicated to not only the truth, as I see it, but also the eventual coming together, through love, social cooperation and altruism, of all mankind.
I will not display a flag that has been so dishonored by the Cheney/Bush administration ~ but instead I will honor the process by which our nation was formed and may yet be reborn;
" All experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security:" The Declaration of Independence (1776)
Howard Zinn, The Progressive, also points out that it is our duty as American citizens to throw off a government that does not live up to its noble beginnings and replace it as soon as possible with one that does.
Allen L Roland
PUT AWAY THE FLAGS
By Howard Zinn
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13823.htm
07/02/06 "The Progressive" -- -- On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.
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