Patriotism and Nationalism is an interesting conversation.
I don’t think they are bad things, necessarily, but a lot of reasonable people stay away as they have been hijacked by more of a lunatic fringe.
Having lived in the States for the past 17 years, I occasionally find myself proud to be British, and I defend it, or represent it, when various things occasionally come up in conversation e.g. differences in health care, Second Amendment stuff, a basic sense of care for the more vulnerable in society, the concept of the BBC, etc.
I likewise always skirt the topics as those those words are only ever divisive.
I hope to instil in my children that the world is their nationality and to be patriotic to that end. Humans have taken us to where we are (for good or bad) not a region within any one border. The pettiness and emotive reflex around current borders is incredibly disproportionate to their importance - borders have never been static and never will be.
Usually translates as posh in Ireland. Did you mean of mixed Irish and English heritage/grew up in both or something else?
Will this mean less hemisphere crossing during season? If so then the Andoni era is looking very promising as it has now been well established that your crossing hemispheres coincides with us playing poorly and has been hypothesised as the cause of our poor season.
A part of the football crazy population in Germany do reject the German national team (despite he have not a foreign background) and do support another country, including my anglophile mate. In Norway? I think a no go.
Despite the German-Dutch rivalry in football, some Germans, that loves the country of the Netherlands, do support the Dutch national team instead the own national team.
And my anglophile mate hates Germany and the German national team despite he have not a foreign background. My parents comes from Sri Lanka and my heart are nevertheless 100 percent German.
Dare say all nations are the same.
I’m sure I wont be the only Scotsman who wont be staying up until gone midnight to watch any Scotland games.
If they win, great.
If they don’t, meh.
One thing I do appreciate about England since leaving is how many walking trails we have and how easy it is to move around via walking or public transport.
Not only does America not have public transport (at least outside of major metropolitan areas) but barely any of the roads are built with walking infrastrucure in mind - you just have to walk/run on the side of the road with cars driving at 70pmh and drivers invariably looking at their phones.
It’s happened more than once that I’ve phoned my wife to come and pick me up while I’m out on a training run because I’ve basically shit out after a car comes flying past way too close.
In the town I live in there was an incident fairly recently where a mum and her baby, who she was pushing in a stroller, where killed by a driver because the driver was distracted and there was no sidewalk for the pedestrians to walk on in their own suburb.
I don’t know who designs roads in America but I’m guessing it’s probably the same people who build the cars.
What happens to people when they get into cars? The level of arrogance, negligence and entitlement skyrockets while empathy plummets.
The reality that I’m likely not going to ride a bike on the road any significant distance is starting to sink in and it’s not sitting very well on a mental level.
Our long time Mayor made making the city bike safe his big project to complete before retiring. He now champions the number of miles of urban bike trails/lanes we have in the city. The problem is very little of it is contiguous. In the busiest downtown section where dedicated bike lanes are most needed the areas where they stop include two of the nation’s most dangerous vehicular intersections. My gym is only a mile from my house. There is a bike lane for 95% of the route and so it should be a straight forward trip. But the last section of road I’d have to cross is something I have to navigate very defensively even in my car so there is no way I am doing it on my bike as a “fun” choice.
Robert Moses and the auto-lobby really did a number on this country. Those ugly, monolithic highway structures which make a lot of US towns and cities at best unpleasant to traverse do seem to have a habit of dividing traditionally black and working class communities from their wealthier neighbours.
Have you ever heard the concept of a stroad? It’s a term coined by a group of urban planners trying to produce safer, more pleasant towns.
They define a road as being something with the purpose of getting traffic from A to B and a street as being a place where things and people are. They then concluded in America that far too much of our roadways are neither one nor the other. They are too big and too busy to be safe (especially for pedestrians), and too much stop-start traffic to effective move cars through resulting lots of accidents and so defined these as “stroads.” Things that define lots of cities as simply being roads connecting one strip mall to another.
Once you hear it makes a lot of sense of what is so unpleasant about that side of America, but Ive barely ever met an American who gets the point being made because its just so second nature to them
