The Cynic Express(ed) 1.35: Protesting a Corrupt Society

     As an ironist, this cynic appreciates the gesture made by MaryKait Durkee of Fallbrook, California, a teenager with capital G-U-M-P gumption. MaryKait has decided that she doesn't like to recite the Pledge of Allegiance with her class. The United States is too violent and corrupt to earn her respect. Besides, she points out that she does not believe in God anyway.

     I appreciate the views of people whom I even disagree with (even when I am poking fun at them) when I think there is a lot of though going on behind them. Were I to have read something by MaryKait criticizing this country's policies in, say, the Taiwain Strait Crisis of 1996 or the Battle for Somalia last year, times when the United States government threatened and implemented violence. I could even understand someone's disgust with the way certain sects of individual citizens, such as teenage students, set upon themselves and the rest of the citizenry with little or no provocation, although I would not fault the country for their misbehaviour. Such prophetic commentary is not forthcoming.

     I can also understand a certain amount of distaste with the current way the newly emergent ruling class oscillate according to frequency of the prevailing polls or who trade corporate profits for national security. I myself am afraid of what concessions this country makes to appease the likes of the Chinese, the Palestinians, even the Bosnian Serbs. Posturing for the sake of pomp and circumstance and then withdrawing quietly after the photo-op or election has passed. Once again, MaryKait has not chosen to use her voice nor her eventual vote to strike at the heart of these matters. She just wants to not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

     I am too afraid that her decision comes from simple teen rebellion. I, too, was young once, and I can remember the proud renunciations from my college years. Children of broken homes with no father-ogres to repudiate or beanstalks to chop down have to do something to establish independence and to vent the boiling hormones. God and country are a couple of mighty tall sequoia to test freshly ground axes. But, of course, they are safer, as they will not disapprove or cuff the child on the backside when he or she looks from out behind the Lisa Loeb glasses and proudly announces his or her new nineties letter jacket of atheism or consciousness (no one is proudly communist or Marxist or associated with any set of beliefs, political or otherwise any more).

     As a sign of the times, however, I would like to add that MaryKait decided to protest her disbelief in the corrupt American system in a new, conscious, and experimental way: She sued her school district.