There’s been some talk lately about the pledge, the U.S. flag, and of course, nationalism generally. Here’s where I’m standing. They made us pledge allegiance “with liberty and justice for all” every morning from ages 5-18 and then get mad when we demand liberty and justice for all.

Those who say veterans fought for “freedoms” need to consider that one of the freedoms they allegedly fought for is freedom of expression. One major example of this is the choice of whether to recite a nationalistic pledge with one’s peers. Or whether to burn a flag.

But most of all, I don’t have particular “allegiance” to the political project that is the United States, because I’m not proud of it in its current form. I *am* proud of my peers, the workers of the U.S. But as a political entity, this country is fairly trashy! It has the worst worker and consumer protections in the rich world; we have the largest wealth inequality and the poverty levels that are rising fastest; we have the largest per-capita imprisoned population. Since so much goes to our military, we get the least human services per dollar paid to taxes perhaps in the entire world. We generally refuse to acknowledge the genocide our ancestors did to natives here. Even liberal hero Barack Obama, when he visited Hiroshima, refused to apologize to its residents for our forefathers’ bombing of its civilians. We have a long history of subjugating other countries for their land and resources, and in our own lifetimes, our country has spent billions if not trillions destabilizing democracies around the world. We are the largest anti-democracy force that has existed in the history of the world, and among historians, that’s not a debate.

We don’t have a democracy here, either; we have a dictatorship of capital. Remember the “let them eat cake” line that the French ruling class allegedly said before the revolution? That’s happening here: we are “free” to do most anything we wish, but because wealth has been siphoned upwards for 50 years now, we don’t have the actual ability to do much of anything. In “live free or die,” the motto of the state where I live (NH), the unstated emphasis is on “die.”

Most of us can’t afford to take even two days off work to demonstrate our grievances, while it’s normal in other rich nations to have six weeks of vacation and their economies keep puttering along. Is their economy working for them? Sounds like it. On the contrary, it feels like we are working for our economy. And what is the “economy” if not for the measure of how well rich people are doing?

Most of us can’t pay for traditional higher education. Republicans in power are trying to exert control over this system and generally dismantle it, believing it to be a conduit for inculcating young minds with socialist ideas. (Audio tape from inside the Nixon and Reagan administrations makes clear this was an aim of theirs.) But with this one, the joke’s on them, as the vast majority of traditional higher education serves to advance capitalist propaganda, not socialism. If you want a socialist education, you pretty much have to educate yourself.

Almost no one can save enough to start a business that would compete with those already at the top. We hear talk of “the oligarchy.” What I’ve described is more akin to feudalism. It’s the logical outcome of the extent to which we’ve let capitalism run amok, that is, the extent of politicians’ deregulation at the behest of the ownership class.

Have you seen the graph of per-capita healthcare spending versus life expectancy? The U.S. is off in our own little world, away from all other nations, spending wild amounts and not getting life expectancy for it. What’s the difference here? A bunch of middlemen are getting high off the hog, skimming “profit” from schemes that shouldn’t have been legalized but were. I put “profit” in air quotes because that’s actually your money and mine. It’s being stolen from us. And it’s not *just* our money, because our money is also the measure of our personal freedom, and our political power. It’s our ability to influence policy such that the playing field is kept level and the schemes don’t exponentially increase. We don’t have that any more, and as you can see, the grifts are accelerating. What started under Reagan continued under every subsequent president and has reached a fever pitch under Trump: we are acting like a dying empire that needs to get looted as much as possible until it collapses. The median home right now, as a percentage of median income, is several times more expensive than housing was in the great depression. This is a measure of wealth inequality, and if it keeps accelerating, you will lose your house, one way or another, even if you own it outright today.

I don’t say the pledge of allegiance because my allegiance is to the working class, who must sell their labor to pay their bills; not to the class of people who pay their bills solely by virtue of owning things that turn them profit. (Profit is simply the excess value of labor skimmed off the top. The difference between what the labor got paid versus what the thing was sold for in a market.) The state as it exists today is one owned—bought and paid for—by that second group of people, the ownership class. My allegiance is not to them and their political project to ensure they stay at the top. Your allegiance shouldn’t be, either. I ally myself with those who’ve chosen to see the world as it is, and to oppose what I’ve described here. Maybe that opposition is substantial, like the young people who dirtied a fighter jet production clean room to stall the war machine. Or maybe it’s as simple as choosing not to make skimming excess value of labor your life’s work. That’s just… unimaginative.

During the pledge the only reason I don’t stay sitting, or kneel and hold up a fist, is because I want to show a little respect to those in the room who are in a different mindset from me. Who haven’t yet learned the above. Those are humans who, like me for most of my life, didn’t understand the things I just wrote. I don’t want to stop the potential for a conversation before it even starts.