Here's a great piece about Brian Mandabach, author of Or Not.
So how does a 46-year-old man write the first-person account of a 14-year-old girl?
"I pulled the old Our Bodies, Ourselves off the bookshelf a couple of times," he recalls laughing, "but mostly, I just had to get into character."
In related new, doesn't it seem like school districts would learn that there's nothing more American than refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school? It has to be the most common form of early civil disobedience. And yet school boards always fall into the trap of suspending kids and then looking like morons by trying to make patently unconstitutional rules. The republic will survive a few kids sitting down for the pledge. Here's the latest nonsense from a MN district.
We only had the pledge up through junior high, when I stopped saying it (no one noticed or cared). So, how did you protest the pledge?
9 comments:
That's an awesome article about Brian.
I remember what a joke it seemed one summer I worked at a Scout camp. Every morning we had a flag ceremony with the pledge and Scout Promise. But because more than half our staff wasn't American, only a handful of adults said the pledge, which meant the kids barely mumbled through it, either. It didn't help that everyone was either half-asleep or starving for breakfast.
Nice article, Brian!
When I taught in Texas, saying the pledge was state law. One of the post 9/11 laws.
In Colorado, the post 9/11 pledge law was found unconstitutional.
Okay - forgive my ignorance, but when 9/11 happened, I was holed up in a foreign country with zero media. Are you telling me that because of 9/11, states passed (or didn't pass, in some cases) laws to force people to do stuff like the pledge...in the name of patriotism?
If so, I find that very odd. Limiting freedom in the name of...freedom.
Duh, Amy! ;)
It might more sense if you'd been living someplace where people drove around in pickup trucks with giant American flags planted in the bed.
I did, eventually, hear about freedom fries.
I stopped saying the PoA in about 8th grade (early 70s) and have never said it since. I wholeheartedly support kids not saying it if they don't want to. People who make these ridiculous rules and laws need to take a complete course in the US Constitution, with subsidiary classwork in the Declaration of Independence.
Sarah Silverman and I would put our right hand on our right shoulder and then say:
I pledge allegiance to the world...
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