I Pledge Allegiance...


Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?

Swear allegiance to the flag
Whatever flag they offer
Never hint at what you really feel
Teach the children quietly
For some day sons and daughters
Will rise up and fight while we stand still
(mike and the Mechanics, In the Stillness Running…)

I pledge allegiance to survival, nowadays. I am not patriotic, not a patriot, and I am NOT American! Pledging allegiance daily to a flag is indoctrination. That said I think you must pledge allegiance to the thing that is most vital to your human existence at any given moment, and in saying that, I can only pledge allegiance to the activity and process of survival currently. It sounds grim I know but when life is distilled down, it makes sense. 

The “sense” it makes is that which is the only kind that can be clung to. Pledging allegiance infers doing what ever it takes to further the goals and outcomes of that set of beliefs, that dogma, that philosophy that one feels is worth pledging to. Think of the Frat and Sorority (Brat) houses on every respectable college campus – the pledge is taken very seriously by each of them and you see the effects of that kind of pledge in politics, law, finance, and other uppity professions where in the members of the “Brat” pledged to, are now enjoying insider benefits in terms of guaranteed employment, positions of power granted, etc. Other examples of Pledging allegiance would be a wolf pup pledging his life to a master that had found him in alone in the forest after poachers killed his mother for her coat. This master then feeds him from pup-hood and trains him up, so that he too might survive. 

The pledge of allegiance to survival is a pledge of absolute necessity in carrying on, in staying alive as for pup, as for human being. Survive or Die. Black or white – there is no wiggle room here for political difference, for using life as a college-age plaything. No. here the pledge is true, pristine, absolute, and in the end freeing. Why freeing? Well one might say the process, the act of survival drives us at such a primal level as to be innate and thus, always compels us to be ready to spring forth and conquer predatory animals that would see us as food; to be ready to spring forth and conquer human attempts to rise up against us, and use us as “cannonen” fodder in their own quest for survival. When pledging allegiance to survival, there is no room for a day of relaxing, there is no room for weekends of shutting off the mind, there is no room for a “mental day” there is no room for eating unhealthy things out of habit and boredom, there is no room for a shifty, random lifestyle that allows it self to be lead by circumstance, happenstance, and falling repeatedly and lazily into the arms of FATE. No room for sadness, no room for angry outbursts except when they cater to the instinct of survival….

These are the days when pledging allegiance to a niche market may be the thing that dulls you into a slumbering state of catatonic and yet still pointed and or pointless, purposelessness. You think your niche is so special that it is above the nullifying effect it will have on your being and soul when it comes time to pull up all stakes and simply survive? This is the perennial question. If I pledge allegiance to survival my path is immediately made clear. My purpose is right in front of my big, blue, widened, alert eyes – no matter what, I must survive. From the clarity of PURPOSE, my goals trickle down the survival-process Plinko board and fall determinedly, right into place.
I need water, I need food, I need shelter, I need fire, I need weapons to fight, I need a defending wall, I need my family and tribe to survive. I need to find healing medicine in the surrounding jungle. I need to ensure my family survives even when mortality claims me. I need to find reconciliation between my drive to survive and the need for me to realize that I am a creation of a prime mover and in that reconciliation find peace and find the strength to survive to the glory of that prime mover that has so created me with the drive to survive….

Yes I pledge allegiance to survival but now because I am endowed with an ability to use a powerful human brain, I use its power to begin to consider that it might well: “do-me-one -better”, to pledge allegiance to the one thing higher than mere survival in an effort to find that reconciliation. So, I begin to ponder pledging my allegiance directly to the prime mover that created me like this. And with a survivalist’s nod to Calvinistic determination, fatefully, with the humility not much unlike the aforementioned canine, I pledge myself to the prime mover that created me, for his glory, mind you, and ask him with puppy-dog helpless humility to help me find food and water, and give me super ability to hunt, and give me the stamina and strength for the complete caring of my clan, (nonetheless for HIS glory – if I do well here, the prime mover looks good, right?), by HIS omnipotence, by HIS omniscience, and by HIS omnipresence, nothing less than surviving.

And in so doing, in the end game, I now give up allegiance to mere survival, and I no longer live in accordance with a pledge to what may have sustained me previously, now reveals itself to be a stark, rigid, and you may even call it an oppressive dogma of simple “wretched” survival as and when circumstance dictated me to react or die. Rather, now having pledged allegiance to the Prime Mover, I live in accordance with an agile and flexible “Wolfma” that is hinged on the will and “woof” of the prime mover, my master that has “found me in the forest” and cared for me, and trained me up to be, what I am now, you see, a wizened, brain-using journeyman predator, designed for, trained up for, and driven by the need to survive, proactively now, and not reactively and of course all made possible only by my pledge to the prime mover that has created me for this purpose. I guess I am patriotic, in a survivalist, Calvinistic, determined, fateful way.

I write

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