your local cryptid

no getting up. no looking at the flag.

not to talk tough but i have sat through every pledge of allegiance in my life, and that includes the bush administration's hyper-patriotic war on terror.

you can NOT be compelled to say the pledge, and that also means you can't be given the 'choice' of doing it or taking a punishment. being sent into the hall is a grey area.

if you are punishing for refusing, parents or a more sympathetic teacher (like say a history or english teacher) can step in to intercede with the principal. do not be afraid to escalate.

Relevately soon after the 2016 anthem kneeling protests, I and queer friends started sitting through the pledge. We live in a military town, I am from a military family- it felt like a massive deal at first. Fortunately, most of our teachers were up to date on social issues and supportive.

By my last year of high school, the pledge was hardly done once a week, and most of our teachers asked the class verbatim- do you all really want to do the pledge? And on the occasion a student insisted it was done, only about half of the class participated.

When I was in middle and high school, Bush was in office. From the point he was elected, when I was in 7th grade, I sat through the pledge every day, and every homeroom teacher I had until I graduated tried to reprimand me. I was sent to the office at the beginning of every year for "not complying", and the word "compulsory" was thrown around a lot, but the office would just send me back with a call to the teacher to tell them I didn't need to stand and there was nothing they could do, and that they couldn't punish me.

When I was in 11th grade, Bush was re-elected and my math teacher turned on the inauguration speech and told everyone that they had to put everything down and watch and listen. I put on my headphones and started drawing and my teacher tried to single me out to the class. He tried to say that what I was doing was tantamount to treason until I asked him what law said that I had to watch and listen to a murderer in chief talk about all the ways he was going to ruin the country and the future for myself and my classmates. We went back and forth for nearly half an hour, progressively getting louder, until we were nearly shouting at each other. The point is, I went out of my way to be a disruption because he wanted so badly for me to be one, and the other students took note.

Prior to that, nobody really paid attention to me. After that, people talked about me, and the school administration looked for any way they could to expel me because I was a disruption and a bad influence on other students, eventually succeeding on made up grounds that couldn't be verified, but were enough for the paperwork.