The New Paltz Planning Board recently decided against beginning its meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance.
What do you think?
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Absolutely should say the pledge..many have sacrificed for your freedoms, the least you can do is pay respect for the many men and women who have paid the ultimate price. Its about respecting our flag not an indoctrination as many think it is. With so many ppl disrespecting old glory these days by standing on the flag, it is an honor to place your hand over your heart and recite our pledge. Don’t let this american tradition die.
Lori Walton
Historian
American legion riders post 13
No. The Planning Board has never said it and should not start. Either way, the matter has ALREADY BEEN DEMOCRATICALLY DECIDED. Such a poll is just a way for people who disagree with the decision to air their grievances. Pointless.
thank you for your comment Christopher Tanis, i appreciate your point of view. Although I disagree its pointless.
Absolutely, I agree with Lori Walton word for word. There are those commenting whom post using a fake name to hide behind a facade to enable them to spew hate without being identified. Some resort to this tactic just like the KKK clansmen place hoods over their heads only to be proud of their hate rhetoric all the while their identities are hidden. The act of a coward.
I find it chilling that american citizens balk at saying the pledge
Couldn’t disagree with Lori Walton or Jon Cohen more. The planning board voted. The petition to begin saying the pledge was defeated. There you have it. Cut and dried. End of story. Democracy in action.
This is the silliest issue I’ve ever heard of. Who cares if some planning board somewhere says the Pledge of Allegiance? Is this really a newsworthy item?
With all due respect to the pledge of allegiance (although I could do without the “under god” part), while it is fine in schools, it is not necessary for local political entities to say it before going about their business. Of course, anyone who wants to can say it, but freedom is about choices, including the choice not to say the pledge.
Yes who can remember when the School bond vote was defeated but the School Board not satisfied with that election decided to nix the democratically voted outcome and call for another election two months later. This is what some call “democracy in action” when the decision works for them. Hypocrisy is the way it rolls in New Paltz.
I have always thought that saying the pledge of allegiance was a privilege and have done so with honor. However, as a veteran, I support the right of any citizen of the USA to choose not to recite it. You’re not more patriotic if you say the pledge. It’s only words, after all.
If we must go back to the school bond vote, remember that the provision for a second vote is built into the law. No one broke or even stretched the law calling for a 2nd vote. Whether to pass a school bond is a very different sort of issue and the process for approving (or denying) it is not the same as that for a resolution in front of a planning board. Something more is at stake with a school bond.
With all do respect I dont understand your logic. But I respect your opinion although it seems hypocritical to me. IMHO
Jon, if my logic isn’t clear, I’m sorry. The school board in New Paltz, as in any district, has the option to present another bond to the public for a vote after 90 days have passed. Whether it is the same bond or a revised one has no bearing on the process. The NP school board chose to present the same bond again, feeling that the original bond was the right amount. They could have, of course, put forth a smaller bond. They chose not to. No one called for a “do over.” The process is, by design, one in which a failed bond vote is followed by another proposal. No one has ever said, nor is it law, that the second (or third or fourth) bond thus presented cannot be the exact same proposal that lost before. In contrast, the process by which matters in a group like the planning board are decided does *not* work that way, although a matter can be proposed, as I understand it, as many times as the member who proposes it wishes to do so. It is, of course, a smaller group voting, and it is unlikely that such a vote would change once re-presented. None of this is hypocrisy. It’s simply two completely different situations.
They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you jail
Steal a lot and they make you king
– Bob Dylan
I move we scrap the pledge and sing more folk songs! 😉
They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you king
– Bob Dylan
I move we scrap the pledge and sing more folk songs! 😉
The Patriotism of Dylan
Sean Wilentz’s new book, Bob Dylan in America, includes this passage describing Dylan’s 1966 performance in Paris at which he draped a U.S flag on the stage for the second half of the concert eliciting “U.S. go home!” jeers from the French audience:
…the curtains part, and there they see to their horror, attached to the backdrop, the emblem of everything they are coming to hate, the emblem of napalm and Coca-Cola and white racism and colonialism and imagination’s death. It is a huge fifty-star American flag. And Bob Dylan, the emblem of American rebellion and imagination’s rebirth, has hoisted it aloft.
Was it a joke? But it is no joke…this Stars and Stripes stuff turns a musical challenge into an assault, an incitement…In England, the idol had traded insults with the hecklers, but in Paris, on this, his twenty-fifth birthday, he strikes first.