Liberty and Justice for Some: A Pledge Unfulfilled
“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Like many Americans, I recited that pledge every morning as a child—standing tall beside my classmates, hand over heart, believing every word. It was drilled into us as a sacred ritual, a daily affirmation of who we were as a nation and what we stood for. Liberty and justice for all.
But now, as an adult reflecting on those words, I have to ask: was it ever true?
Because when you look closely at American history—not the polished version from school textbooks, but the raw, complicated, and painful truth—you begin to see that the ideals we recite often bear little resemblance to the reality we live. That promise of liberty and justice has always been selective, extended only to those deemed deserving by the people in power. The rest—women, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, immigrants, the poor, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities—were written out of that promise, often violently.
We weren’t taught that part. We learned the sanitized stories, the hero narratives, the triumphs. But we rarely learned about the atrocities our government committed in the name of progress or national security. We didn’t hear about the stolen land, the broken treaties, the lynchings, the internment camps, the coups supported abroad, the surveillance of civil rights leaders, or the communities left behind by design.
If this blog moved you, spread the word, leave a comment, and wear it to make a statement.
And yet we still said the words—every morning—liberty and justice for all.
The truth is, for much of American history, liberty and justice were privileges of race, gender, and class—not universal rights. That’s not cynicism; it’s fact. From the Three-Fifths Compromise to Jim Crow, from denying women the vote to locking migrant children in cages, the distance between American ideals and American actions is wide—and it has always been.
We see the same disconnect in another famous line, this time from the base of the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
It’s beautiful. And like the Pledge of Allegiance, it sounds like a moral commitment. But again—what happens when we ask if we’ve lived up to those words?
Have we welcomed the tired and the poor? Or have we vilified them, detained them, deported them, and blamed them for systemic failures? Did we offer breath to the huddled masses—or choke it from them in the streets?
If these words truly meant something, we wouldn’t need mass movements just to remind people that Black Lives Matter, that immigrants are human beings, or that women deserve bodily autonomy. We wouldn’t need to keep fighting for the same basic rights—decade after decade, generation after generation.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us with a choice. We can keep repeating these pledges and poems as empty national theater. Or we can treat them as aspirations—not declarations of what we are, but of what we must become.
Because the words still matter. But only if we make them true.
Until then, I can’t help but feel that what I pledged each morning as a child wasn’t patriotism—it was obedience. And what I believed in wasn’t a country as it was, but a country that could be.
We owe it to ourselves—and to future generations—to stop confusing mythology with truth, and to start living up to the promises we keep pretending we’ve already fulfilled.
Further Reading – liberty and justice for some: A pledge Unfulfilled:
- Democracy in Chains – A chilling expose of the hidden right-wing movement reshaping American democracy.
https://civilheresy.com/democracy in chaains - The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander’s powerful analysis of systemic racism and mass incarceration in the U.S.
https://civilheresy.com/new jim crow - A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn’s groundbreaking book uncovering America’s untold truths about inequality and resistance.
https://civilheresy.com/peoples history
If this blog moved you, spread the word, leave a comment, and wear it to make a statement.
