Should students be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance & hold hand over heart?

[Igel]

58. Hardly.

Eminent domain.

Child protective services.

Mandatory K-12 with mandatory vaccinations in order to not break the law.

Taxes.

Draft/registration.

And that's not the more extremist views on how to restrict, limit, abolish various amendments or impose confiscatory types of income and wealth taxes.

In many cases, your person, your family, your property, your income is considered to belong to "we the people," which effectively means "the state." If you disagree, nice federal marshals or FBI agents will show up with guns to enforce our freedoms.

Most of this will be decreed to be just and right given what the state does for us. Therefore, it must reason, we should owe our allegiance and fealty to the state.

Oddly, the pledge is something that isn't included in this. It's just words, not substance, and that we can object to as Really Important. Substance, not so important. We're post-enlightenment, post-modernist.

Whether you think all those restrictions and requirements are good or bad, saying that "the nation belongs to us" only works if you happen to be in the majority on a whole host of issues. For many of those, there is no actual majority.