What Happened to the MELTING POT? The Growing Opposition to The PLEDGE and The ANTHEM
As nearly everyone knows, any good bedtime story, or fairy tale, starts with “Once upon a time”, right? When is THAT time and what is happening IN that time? Let’s start with something that could only happen in a bedtime story. We take one Jewish man, very active in politics and marry him to an Islamic woman, also active in politics, and they live happily ever after. Yeah, that sounds plausible doesn’t it? What person in their right mind would believe that could ever happen? Oh wait…it did happen, and the people in this fairy story are real! It’s Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin. One might speculate on why they married, why they stayed together and why some of us find them so interesting.
Let’s take one part of that at a time, starting with why they married. It has been rumored that they each tried to convert the other, but the effort seemed to have failed. As to why they may have stayed together, there’s this thought…he was in the United States Congress and might have access to information that could be helpful to the people in her background. It has been reported, rightly or wrongly, that her family has strong ties to various Islamic groups, some of which have the destruction of the United States as their stated goal. A job, as an assistant, that has turned into the right-hand person and the very confidential ear to Hillary Clinton, that seems to be the endgame. Should Mrs. Clinton become President, Abedin would be in a powerful position to help the Islamic cause in this country.
They elicit interest simply because of who and what they are…individuals whose backgrounds are diametrically opposite, but they remain together. Would Weiner get some sort of post in the Clinton administration? We’ll just have to wait and see because, as it stands, we could compare this couple to James Earl Ray being BFF’s with Martin Luther King Jr.
Once upon a time, children in schools all over the country stood up in class, first thing in the morning, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Mind you, that pledge doesn’t say anything about the government, a political party, any sort of ethnicity or mindset when it comes to religion. It says that you pledge your allegiance to the flag, and to the republic for which it stands. Looking at that pledge, is there anything in there that one could find obnoxious? Anything in there that sounds like you’re favoring one group over another, or one religion over another? I don’t think so. A school in Leon County, Florida does seem to think, however, that the pledge of allegiance is somehow one-sided, or politically incorrect, or whatever excuse they’re using. They sent home with their students, a paper that says the parents can opt the child out of saying the pledge. One parent wrote that it was the dumbest thing ever, and that it was a shame. Of course it is. The United States was born from people with a single purpose in mind…to rid themselves of the heavy-handed oppression of an English king. The pledge reflects that when you say the flag represents the republic. We are a free people, at least for the present, and that flag says that we will not tolerate another tyrant running the country. Okay, maybe I did forget that we DO have a wannabe king in the White House…but he’s leaving soon. You look around and you’ll see that there are all sorts of symbols of our freedoms, and the flag is not the least of them either.
While in that same general vein, it wasn’t that long ago, about six weeks maybe, when a group of fifty students, visiting the 911 memorial at Ground Zero, were asked to stop singing the National Anthem by some security personnel. Now, if anything symbolizes the perseverance of the American people, the new building on Ground Zero certainly does. The students, from someplace in North Carolina, probably on a field trip to New York City thought they were showing their respect by singing The Star Spangled Banner. Obviously that was the wrong thing to do. Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away…oh, sorry, wrong story. In our story we are being told that it’s not proper to sing the National Anthem at a memorial site such as the 911 Ground Zero. We sing the same piece of music at sports events, but ban it at national memorial sites? What sort of backwards logic prompts that type of reaction?
Parting shot. Let’s talk about a real “once-upon-a-time” event…the rise of Saudi Arabia. It was back in the 1950s, I believe, that the Saudi family decided they didn’t need the Americans to run their oil fields. I think the phrasing went like this…” We’ll take your iron (technology) but you leave our faith alone”, or something like that. From that time on, we give the Saudis money in one hand, which they transfer to the other hand and dole it out to terrorist organizations. Why do we continue to give money to a country that is, at best, a fair-weather friend? The only reason that comes to mind is that we think we’ll eventually convert them, which is not going to happen, to coming into the western world. Now, THAT is a scary bedtime story.
Larry Usoff, US Navy Retired
(aka The Old Alarmist)
Duty. Honor. Country.
photo credit: The Pledge Of Allegiance via photopin (license); Joe Schlabotnik
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