Most of us have parents or grandparents who used to recite the Pledge with the "Under God" portion while doing the Bellamy Salute. Now known better as the Heil Hitler gesture. Even as an elementary school kid, I always thought the Pledge ritual in the morning was so odd. And I was raised by generations of veterans and public servants. It's still so odd to me, like my wife anointing my children with holy water before mass. Either the ideals of the county or christ live in your bones of they don't. No hand gestures or repetitive speech is gonna change that.
csb/ In law school, I think it was for CivPro, we went to a swearing-in ceremony for buncha folks in Sacramento. And it folks from East Asia and Latin America and all points in between. It was really cool to see. A bunch of my mother's family was born in Mexico and didn't have proper documentation even until their deaths. But it was a simpler time. But I remember these people were all speaking different languages to one another after the swearing-in. And one person's relative would translate and then another and another. And the most wonderful aspect of it was they were discussing, aside from the joy of citizenship and new opportunity, was the wonderment of the U.S. Constitution. They had to learn parts of it for the "test" as we all know. But they would speak about how amazing it was, so different from anything their home country had. And they spoke to details that even I didn't know despite literally being there for a law school course based on the Constitution developed by then SCOTUS Justice, Anthony Kennedy. These people not just learned it by rote, they embraced it. They were warmed by its light. They were living it.
And now I gotta listen to tens of millions of fucking abject morons start conversations, "You know, as a natural born citizen and student of the constitution." I'll take that Sacramento courtroom of dedicated immigrants over most Texans any day of the fucking week. Congrats to all our new citizens. We don't make it to the next thing without you....