Many students don’t stand for the pledge.  This is a fact that sparks controversy in Kennebunk High School and across the United States. It’s been drilled into our heads since our first year of school, when we were about five and easily influenced, that when the Pledge of Allegiance booms through the sound system, you stand. You place your hand over your heart, and you repeat the mantra in a steady, yet staccato fashion. For years, no one questioned the pledge. As kids, it was just something you did every morning. However, as time went on and kids grew older, the pledge began to become a question of morality and whether or not it fits into today’s society.

As an IB student in Mrs. Pierce’s junior English class, the morality of the Pledge was something we discussed often. Over the summer, IB English students had read a passage from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, and we walked into Mrs. Pierce’s classroom on the first day of school with swirling ideas of dystopian societies and how our own society might fit in. In actuality, we probably walked in wondering when we could leave and why summer went by so quickly, but Mrs. Pierce was quick to get us thinking. We began discussing the Pledge of Allegiance when we, a first block class, were expected to deliver the speech, and someone didn’t. This action called into question the whole idea of the Pledge of Allegiance in the first place. To us, repeating a mantra that we had been taught since we were merely five years old seemed very strange and very dystopian-like. Ideas were thrown around, and we came to the conclusion that the pledge no longer included every group of people in the United States. That line-”with liberty and justice for all”-no longer rang true for us, because we realized that the United States does not have liberty and justice for all. In a country where homosexual marriage only recently became legal, and yet homosexual people are still being targeted; where Muslim people get stopped more frequently at airports simply because we pretend only one group of people are capable of being terrorists; where white women still make only seventy-nine cents to every man’s dollar, and women of color make even less, there is not justice for all.

Personally, I stand for the Pledge to show respect. Although I’m not represented equally in the United States, I’m still American, and I’ve still grown up with the Pledge of Allegiance in the back of my head-I’ve even begun to learn it in Spanish. However, I tend not to speak the words, as to me, they aren’t necessarily true. It isn’t only me. It’s anyone who believes that there isn’t justice for all, or just that the concept of repeating the same mantra every morning is strange. In retrospect, whether or not one should stand for the Pledge of Allegiance comes down to one thing, simply: choice.