by

Jansen Estrup

In the story “2002 The Greatest Generation Redux” of my memoir, War Stories for My Granchildren, I made the following statement:  

“Military folk salute the rank and what it stands for, not the individual. So I was instructed more than fifty years ago. All citizens are required to salute the flag of our country. It is the image, the symbol, the promise we honor, not the government or its brutality or its fallen heroes, even though various officials wish us to believe that those in government have authority given by some entity other than We, The People. 

Of the many salutes I have rendered, most of them for the wrong reasons, the one I sent this ancient couple was the most reflexive and heartfelt, the most meaningful. Living long and well, loving and being loved, those are worthy achievements no matter what the nationality, faith or station.  

It is the only kind of salute I care to render, anymore.”

Part of that statement is wrong, the part which states, All citizens are required to salute the flag of our country. When I was four years old, while our nation, indeed all of the Allied Nations, were losing World War II, the United States Supreme Court made this ruling upholding a fundamental principle of the USA:

In the 1943 case, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette the Court ruled 6 to 3, that no government official can force citizens to participate in patriotic rituals, including the Pledge of Alligiance. Nor can they legally punish anyone for such refusal.

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” The Court said.

Even during the prospect of defeat by the most vile of forces, our nation was willing to stand up for the Bill of Rights, and it did not weaken us. It simply made clear what we were fighting to preserve. Dignity requires that we stand firm for the rights of every individual (especially those who hold different views). Only that confirms our own, and projects those rights into the future.

It is of passing interest that the state of West Virginia also stipulated that the Pledge must be given with the arm extended, palm out, in what we came to call the 'Nazi salute' … other states had the same requirement. Even after the war, as a First Grader, I remember doing the Pledge that way in 1945 Florida. I have also noted loyalty for religious figures demonstrated in churches by this mannerism. The 1943 Court ruling did not stipulate the manner in which indivuals should show 'respect'.

Ours is a 'rough and ready' sort of brawl. It is not easy or simple to include the entire human experience in our embrace, but the United States of America is the only nation which ever made the attempt to try – and perhaps that is reason enough to appreciate, if not salute her monumental experiment. Not 'our nation, right or wrong' but our nation, willing to 'become a more perfect union.'

As always, it for each of us to decide.