I don’t understand this weird American obsession with flag. I was looking at some photos of Trump’s rallies. Flags everywhere - on shirts, hats, glasses etc. And this bizarre cult of the flag - “it cannot touch the ground” etc.
At the end of the day the flag is just a piece of cloth. If you worship any flag or take offense to any flag, you need to get a life.
I understand your view, but it depends on your country. In Denmark the flag is used in a different way in everyday life I think. And I would say there are good reasons to be proud of Denmark as a country and the people have done well to own the flag themselves in this way. But yea, it can also be used in bad ways.
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I can’t speak for other countries, but here in the UK the National flags tend to be flown for two reasons:
There are shit loads of St George crosses being flown at the moment, because the England team has got through the Euro football finals. If we lose tonight, they’ll begin to disappear tomorrow.
You’ll mostly see the Union flag being flown in areas of high racism. Deprived areas, where people have been made to believe that forrins took their jobs and welfare money. They display the flag to show that they’re “true Brits”, unlike all those brown folk.
Outside of this it’s quite unusual for regular people to display either of the national flags. I can’t say I’ve ever owned one, and I’m in my 40s. That said, I’m not terribly nationalistic. I’m proud of my country in terms of how it looks, and how we (now) preserve our long history, but I’m also painfully aware of the failings of the UK, and more specifically, England over the past few centuries.
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I’ve seen this in my chunk of South America. It isn’t exclusive to Americans.
Not in the same way. In the US I believe you swear to the flag or something? Which seems super strange to me.
In Denmark the flag is used in basically any celebration, especially birthdays. It’s common to have a cake with as many flags on as your age (usually for kids).
Luckily that flag is easy to emulate. Imagine trying to frost 10 American flags onto a cake.
Oh usually it’s small paper flags stuck into the cake on small wooden sticks, not frosting :)
That makes more sense. Thanks.
Sorry for the battering of rhetorical questions, but…
…what is “to be proud of a country”?
Achievements of people from the past? But you see people with laudable achievements through the whole world. Why specifically those associated with your country, instead of, say, another? And more importantly, why aren’t we proud of what we, as individuals, do with our present?
Proud of a culture? I get that people relate to others sharing their culture; but contrariwise to what that Napoleonic meme says (with all its disgusting implications), countries don’t need to coincide with cultures. Cue to Switzerland, a clusterfuck since HRE times, faring far better than a Portugal who has been culturally homogeneous since 1100.
And even demarcating cultures, gets tricky and arbitrary. It’s all a bunch of continua. Eventually this sort of proudness will boil down to “I’m drawing the line HERE. This one is from this side of the line, so I’m proud of them. That one isn’t, so who cares.”
Is it being proud of your impact on others, through your everyday interactions? But most people in a country - even a small one (more like Andorra than Denmark) - are not meaningfully affected by you.
So, to keep it short: every single thing that we could be proud of, as human beings, is better serviced by either a smaller or bigger identity.
No need to be sorry :)
Definitely more the latter rather than the former. There is a great deal of trust in Danish society. There is a shared understanding, community and culture that Danes are proudly part of - proud because we believe it is a good culture (and I think the happiness scores that get released every so often for different countries speak for themselves).
I don’t see it like that. Yes, someone living in the other part of Denmark doesn’t directly affect me of course. But I do think they meaningfully affect me, even if in a small part. I think Denmark is still small enough that it matters that someone in the big city in the other part of the country is still connected to me by culture and a shared “zeitgeist”, if that makes sense.
Anyways, I hope you can maybe understand that for some people, there can be such a thing as being proud of your country. You don’t have to understand fully though, I understand it can be hard coming from another culture (also it’s not like I speak for all Danes obviously and some would certainly disagree with what I’m saying here). I would encourage you to try visiting Denmark one day and maybe see for yourself :)
What you talk about, concerning “trust in the Danish society”, is clearly a cultural matter. And, as I highlighted in the other comment, cultures neither coincide with countries, nor they should.
We could spend weeks discussing what to “meaningfully affect someone else” entails, but that would be pushing a boundary line back and forth between points of a gradient, to force a conclusion for either side. (That’s always a problem when trying to handle quantitative matters with qualitative labels.)
However: no matter where you put that line, it won’t coincide with the country, because some people from other countries affect you more than some people from the same country as you. Perhaps because they’re shaping what you think, perhaps because they have political power (even over other countries than yours), so goes on. (The opposite is also true - you’re likely affecting far some people from other countries than some other people from within your country.)
If I may be honest, the argumentation that you’re using is mostly the same as I’ve seen coming from other people. It is not a matter of “lack of understanding”, but disagreement.
I think that’s very reductionist. Countries clearly have a large influence on culture and culture often forms around countries as people in a country share borders and law and politics and all that.
Anyways, we can agree to disagree if you insist. I do think you’re being slightly closed-minded in this case though, but it’s not a big deal.
To influence is not the same as to dictate. And the ways that a country influences culture of its citizens are, most of the time, shitty - cue to the linked example of Vergonha. (It’s actually a mild example, when you remember that massacres are a damn efficient way to have “a large influence on culture”.)
And, sure, there are even milder versions of that. And considerably less efficient.
And it forms also across the borders too, to such an extent that “we have the same head of state” and “we’re subjected to the same laws” become just a drop in an ocean. Food gets shared, people learn each other’s languages (or make a contact language in the spot, that eventually is passed to their children), fashion and architectural trends get mimicked… even the laws get mimicked. Or they simply are born in a place and move 5km next door, and that happens to be the other country already.
Of course, as long as the countries aren’t artificially trying to prevent that from happening.
I don’t think that I’m being closed-minded, but that I’m taking more things into account than you are.