A prayer for our flag (May 2003)
One day during the recent conflict in Iraq my students told me that they couldn’t understand why Americans were so patriotic. The strange thing was that they had chosen that particular day to make their observation. I had been watching the war on television for days, proudly observing how our soldiers were conducting this war with care and precision in order to inflict as little damage to human life and infrastructure as was humanly possible, and that very morning I had woken up with the “Pledge of Allegiance” in my head.
Perhaps I should pause to specify that I, too, was a rather rebellious young lady in my youth and felt uncomfortable about standing there with my hand on my heart reciting this sort of prayer to the flag. However, that morning I kept repeating it in my head like a rosary. And while I was walking under the arcades of Piazza Statuto on my way to school, I found myself reciting it aloud, even if softly so: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God…” This the part that used to particularly annoy my secular democratic spirit. But that morning I waved my arms about widely, as the Italians do, indifferent to the eyes and ears of any would be onlookers, and interjected, “Yes. OK. Go ahead. Put God into it, if you like. Why not?” before continuing, “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
And that wasn’t the only time during the war that I invoked the God that I say I don’t believe in. Several days after the beginning of the conflict, knowing that this was a war that should have been fought in January if it were to be fought properly, when it began to get hot and the sand storms started to plague the deserts, I found myself saying, “God, if you exist, please make it get cold again.” I don’t know whether to give the credit to God or to my will that our soldiers were able to do their job under the best possible conditions. The fact is, the next day it got cold again.
Sandra Giovanna Giacomazzi teaches Law and Economics at the Liceo Europeo Umberto I in Turin, Italy. She also writes for the Roman daily, L'Opinione della Libertà and was awarded the Mario Soldati Prize for Journalism and Criticism for 2002.
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