Be patriotic. Or else.

[Trigger warning for violent imagery.]

A couple days ago FOX, that ever objective and factual news station, ran a story called:

"School Officials in Mass. Town Won't Let Students Recite Pledge of Allegiance"

Guess what happened. I'll give you three but I'm sure you only need one:

Arlington police are investigating threatening messages sent to School Committee members yesterday in response to a controversy surrounding reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in school.

Police Captain Robert Bongiorno would not specify which committee members received the messages, but he said some were anti-Semitic.

“The messages are offensive and hateful and potentially criminal,’’ Bongiorno said.

Police launched the investigation as school officials blasted what they said were incorrect reports by Fox News that the School Committee had banned the pledge in Arlington schools.

“It is unfortunate that the national media has chosen to distort this very serious debate in a manner which so badly misinforms the public,’’ committee chairman Joseph Curro said in a press release yesterday. “Recent reports have done little to present the facts . . . and have been seized upon by many people throughout the country to target our dedicated school leaders with unwarranted hate mail and threats.’’

As the Globe reported yesterday, controversy about reciting the pledge in Arlington schools began last week when Arlington High School senior Sean Harrington requested that the pledge be led each day at school. The Pledge of Allegiance has not been said at the high school for years, and the School Committee voted 3-to-3 on a motion that would have required a daily, but voluntary, recitation of the pledge to be led over the intercom. Because of the tie vote, the motion failed.

School Committee members said they would look into enacting a pledge policy this summer, and on Tuesday, Arlington High principal Charles Skidmore told the Globe he would lead the pledge in the school’s auditorium every morning for students who wished to say it. Harrington said he still wants the pledge broadcast into each classroom.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Curro said that since incorrect reports by Fox News that Arlington had banned the pledge, committee members have been receiving messages from “all over the country.’’

Curro said a couple of the messages sent to committee members included indirect threats and one said the members should go to North Korea, where their throats would be slit.

Ah, yes. There's some patriotism for you. Or not.

According to this RawStory article:

At a school committee meeting last week, Harrington delivered what a story in the Arlington Patch described as "an impassioned speech ... reminding the members that 'freedom is not free.'" The committee ultimately deadlocked, however, on a proposal for a voluntary recitation of the Pledge to be led each day over the intercom, with some members expressing concerns about infringing on the rights of students and teachers who did not wish to participate.

"The exchange that followed the vote became quite heated," the Patch reports, "with Harrington's supporters vocalizing their disapproval and shouting expletives at the Committee."

"They told us to go back to our own countries," Chairman Curro told the Globe.

Nice. I'm sure Mr. Harrington was duly upset about such actions from his supporters, right?

"I was really heartbroken," Harrington said of the deadlocked vote. "It's hard to think that something so traditional in American society was turned down. ... It tells me that we've basically cast aside what our country is founded on."

Well then. The tie vote on forcing people to listen to the pledge every day tells me that some people on the committee are reasonable. Harrington's statement, however, tells me that I'm right to be a bit concerned about his school's history program, though the drama program seems to have at least one star here.

And I don't have to imagine that Harrington and I do not see eye to eye on the pledge issue.