This coming Sunday in the US! And every day you make the pledge.

 

Flag Day: and the 5 Words We Forgot

Every year on June 14, Americans celebrate Flag Day. We display the Stars and Stripes, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and honor the sacrifices of those who served under our flag.  But this is making a pledge!

Yet few of ask: What exactly are we pledging allegiance to do?

The last five words of the Pledge are among the most important in the American ideal, our language, and the American spirit:  ”…with liberty and justice for all.”

Not liberty for some.  Not justice for some.  Not freedom for one nation at the expense of another.

Liberty and justice for all.   These words echo the vision of the Declaration of Independence, which appealed not to power, wealth, tribe, or nation, but to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The Declaration offered humankind the principles greater than governments themselves should have codified.  Principles rooted in human freedom, security, health, dignity, equality, and our common irreversible interdependent social human species....often referred to as humankind or humanity.

Unfortunately, our patriotic political culture treats allegiance to the Constitution as if it were an end in itself. And within the US population, political polarization is increasing along with hatred and an increasing belief that violence is not only possible...but necessary. 

The U.S. Constitution was a remarkable achievement but flawed from the start.  It still has three ways of being amended.   But human minds are steadfast addicted to their beliefs and willing to kill and even die defending them.   Thomas Jefferson believed any constitution should be rewritten every 19 years, to fit the next generation, just as a jacket would need to be altered to fit a growing person. 

The greatest crisis, one after another over the last 240+ years, and now, increasingly close to a human extinction event.  If not in a nuclear war or bioterrorist Armageddon...with either linked to the evolution of AI... or AGI itself orchestrating mass murder.  And there is not a single AI expert who believes they or anyone else, can predict what AGI will do when it arrives, and it will, and we cannot control it. 

The US Constitution was designed for an old world - with separate states and limited interdependence. Today’s world is the opposite.  Now all people and nations are increasingly connected and interdependent as global forces (climate, capitalism, corruption, conflicts, contagion, and a UN Charter that enables nations with unprecedented military power, slow democratic power, or a dictatorship to determine life and death of people anywhere and nature everywhere) that cannot be stopped by borders, missiles, drones, popular vote, pathological liars, or police power.  

Human survival itself is now entirely interdependent.  The central challenge of our time is not simply whether “We the people” can govern itself, but whether humanity can unite in time, and learn the solutions, government have ignored, to keep people and nature healthy and sustainable.    

We continue to believe and act as though nations are independent - when the evidence points in the opposite direction. Our economies, ecosystems, technologies, and security are woven together more tightly than ever before.  Believing otherwise does not preserve freedom; it undermines it.

The greatest irony of Flag Day is that a few hundred million Americans have pledged allegiance to “liberty and justice for all,” with relatively few making those words the organizing principle of their work or civic lives.

If liberty and justice are truly for all, they must apply beyond our political tribe, religion, race identity, and especially beyond our national borders. The pledge phrase challenges us to expand our moral concern to everyone whose life is affected by our decisions.

It’s been said many times by US policy makers that “all politics is local”. What they don’t say, and we persistently ignore is “all consequences are global”.  The increasing insecurity we see around the world—the erosion of democratic norms, the growth of conflict, environmental degradation, economic instability, and widening inequality—is not merely a failure of institutions. It is a failure to take seriously the promise we casually and habitually repeat with hand over our heart.

The flag is not the goal.   The Constitution is not the goal.   Even national greatness, or Making America Great Again, is not the goal.    The goal is what the flag was supposed to represent: a society and human spirit committed to liberty and justice for all.

This Flag Day, perhaps the most patriotic act is not reciting familiar words. It’s asking ourselves whether we are willing to live by them.  The future of humanities freedom, security, prosperity and sustainability depend on those final five words becoming more than a slogan.

Keep your pledge, or stop making it. 

Liberty and justice for all.  The alternative will not end well.