By letting us see you as a 7th grader bravely refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance you take all of us back to our school days. At about the same I was wrestling with the question why we were pledging our allegiance in public to a flag?

I could imagine 19th soldiers needing all of the courage they could summon to follow the flag into battle. Requiring them to pledge publicly their allegiance to the flag made sense to me. We without any context we were being told to promise to follow the “flag” wherever it went. I however didn’t have the courage or integrity to refuse. I just lowered my voice and told myself that was protest.

Like you I learned later of the courage of the Jehovahs Witness girls and of the Barnett case. in fact, fifty years later I became one of Jehovah’s Witnesses by making a commitment to follow a way of life.