Pledge Problems
As a child, I thought that making a pledge meant putting your right hand over your heart and saying, “I pledge allegiance to the flag….” I was perhaps eight years old when I realized there are other kinds of pledges.
A steel-gray haired woman in a dark skirt almost to her ankles, proclaimed the evils of demon rum from the pulpit of our church. She was a representative of the WCTU, The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, an early activist group focused on the problem of alcoholism. Her pulpit presentation encouraged listeners to pledge never to imbibe alcoholic beverages. I signed the pledge card that was passed along the pew and put twenty-five cents in the collection plate as a symbol of my commitment. In the nineteen-thirties, twenty-five cents for an eight year old was a huge gift, at least in the eyes of this eight year old. It would have bought me a double scoop ice cream cone and five marshmallow bananas at least. I have no question WCTU members spoke from Rehoboth pulpits as well during the immediate post-Prohibition era.
I kept my pledge until I reached college. Then I realized some of my classmates didn’t have the same compunction about consuming alcohol that I did. Furthermore, some of the imbibers were my friends and people I admired. I never threw another “nickel on the drum,” at least not the drum of the WCTU. Since then, I’ve pledged to support alumni college funds, public broadcasting companies, and a host of forgotten entities. But today, as the 2012 political campaign moves from simmer to boil, pledges seems to be the added spice of the political porridge.
I read of pledges on a daily basis. Most Republican Congressmen and candidates have signed pledges to never vote for an increase in taxes. Some have pledged to do away with Rowe vs. Wade. Michelle Bachman is on record pledging to reinstate “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” if elected. And several presidential hopefuls have now signed a pledge “to appoint a commission to investigate harassment” of anti-LGBT activists.
The pledging plethora presents a problem. First, by definition a pledge is “...a person or thing given or held as security for the performance of a contract, as a guarantee of faith.”
Why is a “guarantee of faith” needed? Whatever happened to “my word is my bond?” If I say I’m going to do something, I do it. Why must I make a pledge to do what I said I’d do anyway? At the least, it sounds like overkill. But implicit in requiring a candidate’s pledge is the premise that the candidate’s word can’t be trusted. Regrettably, there’s ample proof for that. Therefore, as an advocate for whatever cause, I want a candidates promise in writing.
But, if you can’t trust my word, you can’t trust my signature either. Nevertheless, the pledge plays well with a candidate’s political base. Thus, there’s a push to get pledges signed so candidates can be held accountable to his or her promise, or embarrassed for failing to keep it.
Another feature that bothers me in the pledge-mania is that I’ve heard nothing about candidates signing pledges for more jobs, better education, food for the hungry, or relief for the mortgage stricken. There’s a paucity of plans, much less pledges, to create a better, more humane society. The flurry of pledges caught in the signing frenzy, all seem to be pledges to undo programs already in place, to take us back to an earlier time—a time before taxes, before Social Security, before Medicare.
In our country, those who support a return to minimum taxation, minimum regulation —a return to the “Golden Age,” of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford—are called conservatives, or more recently Tea Party. No one seems to remember that the so-called “Golden Age” was built on sweat-shops, child labor, segregation and other dubious points of public pride. It was also know less flatteringly as the Robber Baron Age.
It’s interesting that in other parts of the world those who want to return to the Golden Age are called Taliban. The Taliban represents the radical Muslim community wanting a return to an earlier time, the Golden Age of Islam in the fourteenth century. In addition to the desire both groups share to return to an earlier, supposedly more pristine, time, both groups want, not only to insert God into politics, but for God to dominate the political scene. Of course, in both cases, it’s their God who dominates. There is no other. My God doesn’t count.
I find the religious emphasis of both groups—their desire to dominate politics with their God, and their desire to return to legal codes of the past, whether Sharia or Old Testament law, absolutely frightening.
Perhaps it’s just semantics, or my problem with spelling. But, maybe instead of Taliban, the American branch of back-to-the future should be called the Tea-liban.
John Siegfried, a former Rehoboth resident, lives in Ft. Lauderdale. Email John Siegfried.