I'll never forget when I visited The Netherlands a few years back. I had just stepped out of a museum in Amsterdam when my travel companion and I ended up talking to a couple of natives. They expressed to us how brash America can come off to the rest of the world. One of them said "They think they are so much better than the rest of the world, when they don't realize how young they are. There are places much older and they completely ignore the beauty and history of other places. They just think they're the best."

Now, this totally isn't the fault of the pledge or the anthem. But I think this whole issue just touches on a much deeper issue.