Other essays on this theme

Essay: "Loyalty"

Loyalty today means, to me, a bunch of illiterate children running amok on their street corners to spit on cars, drop crap on cars from overpasses, throw rocks at school buses, paint eyesores and scribbles on buildings, fences and canalworks. Just general vandalism â€" something to occupy their tiny minds that are so very slow to expand into maturity because they have so little guidance from adults or educators.

But, strangely, this isn't the lowest pit of loyalty. Worse loyalty springs from too much adult attention of the military kind. This kind of training teaches you to be loyal to the flag, which generally has a bunch of sleazy, greedy politicians hiding in it who want to rob some nation by proxy. In Guatemala, we stole their banana plantations with our loyal, sneaky CIA soldier kids. In Cuba it was United Fruit Company and the sugarcane field. In Columbia, Peru and Ecuador, it's the dope. In Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Nigeria, Venezuela, Mexico, Congo and Angola, it was oil. (We've been robbing the Arabs of their oil since the early 1920's). In Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and Burma, we were out to take over from the French, who were tired of dying for stealing their rice and heroin.

You get the idea from all these examples â€" loyalty is good when it helps the cause of civilization, but it is easily turned toward harmful deeds by conniving politicians or even a pack of punk kids with no mind. Loyalty should carefully examine its goals.