Last night, visiting after dinner, our family started discussing the Pledge of Allegiance.  Certain members of my family were saying that it seemed like serious brain washing to have kids stand and say it every morning.  That we shouldn’t pledge our allegiance to anyone but God and each other.  The kids were really adamant about pledging their allegiance to their dad, but not to the government.  (what about me?) What if the government goes bad?  What does it all mean?  So, we got out the Scholastic Children’s Dictionary and looked up the following words: pledge, allegiance, flag, republic, nation, under, indivisible, liberty and justice.  We rewrote the pledge based on the Children’s dictionary.  Here it is:

I make a sincere promise to be loyal to the piece of fabric that is the symbol of America and to the form of government in which the people have the power to elect representatives who manage the government that the flag stands for.  One large group of people who live in the same part of the world and share the same language, government and customs, beneath God, unable to be broken or divide and with freedom and fair, impartial treatment for everyone.

We still won’t stand and say it at our school, that seems to institutionalized. But, I liked it, it was simple, easy to understand and didn’t seem so memorized.  What do you think?