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On Monday, October 15, the school board of Madison,
Wisconsin, held an open forum to discuss its controversial vote the week before. In that vote, it had instructed the public schools to forgo
having students recite the pledge of allegiance and to offer only an
instrumental rendition of the Star Spangled Banner in the classrooms. PSD To HTML conversion is important to webmasters because they cannot use the PSD file as it is for their web pages. if you need PSD To HTML conversion service save yourself some time, effort and money and send it in to the professionals. This decision became a bloody shirt for talk radio hosts and rightwing church groups to wave around.As I walked in the school, I saw a VFW troupe in full regalia and people with signs saying "God Bless America." There were other people holding signs affirming the separation of church and state, but they were outnumbered. And so was I. I couldn't get into the crowded auditorium, so I moved out
into the cafeteria with the overflow. Through the sound system, we heard the meeting begin. All at once, people in full throat were saying the pledge of
allegiance. Someone inside the auditorium got it going, and almost everyone in
the cafeteria rose to recite it, some with hands over their hearts. When the pledge ended, I could hear chants of "USA,
USA," and I felt like I was at the Scopes Trial. More than 200 people had signed up to talk for three minutes
each, and the school board decided to let students go first. A homeschooler from Illinois denounced the decision as
unpatriotic. A girl from Mt. Horeb, a town twenty miles away, said she was
tired of having her teachers tell her what to do, like telling her she should
have sex before marriage. A few students did support the board, and they were greeted
by general tut-tutting in the cafeteria. Three high school boys with short hair walked by wearing
stencilled shirts with the words "Pro-Patriotism" and
"Anti-Liberal" in big type on the front, and the pledge in small type.
On the back was a picture of Osama bin Laden in a circle with a line drawn
through him and the words: "Kill Osama bin Laden." When it was the adults' turn at the mike, most of the
speakers opposed the board, some with a great deal of vitriol. Several said the board members should resign or be recalled. Another said, "You should not be recalled. You should be
tried for treason!" Still another described the city as "The People's
Republic of Madison," and called the board members a bunch of
"arrogant, elitist, heavy-handed, radical leftovers of the Vietnam era, who
in your great zeal to protect the minority have stifled the expression of the
majority." That one brought the cafeteria crowd to its feet. One man countered the criticism that the anthem was
militaristic by saying he's sung the anthem thousands of times "but I never
felt the urge to conquer my neighbor's lawn or grab their chairs." Another said that the problem wasn't just the lack of
patriotism; it was the lack of discipline. We need to get that discipline back,
he said, recalling with approval how one of his teachers "grabbed me by the
neck and put me up to the locker." One Vietnam War veteran said he was proud to wear the
uniform, and concluded: "God and America are inseparable." Many speakers did support the board's decision, and raised
the crucial points about separating church and state, about the tyranny of the
majority, and about the dangers of blind patriotism. But the die had been cast. The board was under enormous pressure all week to back down. It had received death threats: One person wrote that the
hijackers should have flown their planes not into the World Trade Center but
into the Madison School Board administration building. It was being blackmailed economically: Business groups were
cancelling their conventions in Madison. Universities in other states were banning the school board
from recruiting teachers on their campuses. The governor of Wisconsin called the board members to urge
them to change their minds. And as the meeting was going on, a group was organizing to
recall the school board members in the room right next to the cafeteria. In the wee hours of the morning, the board finally
capitulated, voting 6-to-1 to have Madison public school students recite the
pledge or sing the national anthem on a daily basis. The power of the mob had prevailed. A few days later, I bumped into a neighbor of mine whom I had
seen at the meeting shaking his head in horror. I asked him what he made of it
all. "I thought I was in Nazi Germany," he said. Matthew Rothschild >>Home>> |