Battletard wrote:
Allegiance to one particular side of a line on a map over another will never make any amount of sense to me.
Then perhaps you should consider life with no allegiance at all.
People will not respect your "rights" because you say so. You have a country that recognizes those rights, or you don't. Nationalism, like family, is a two-way street.
And where do you think you came from? Where did you get your ideas, your culture? Do you think that what you believe, your attitudes, are purely arbitrary or similar to all other people in this world? Or are they different?
Ego may incline you to believe that you are your own man, but you are not, you grew up in America, you can't ever be anything but an American, what you believe, your attitudes, are necessarily American, even if you don't agree with all that is taken for granted by most in this country. It is what has shaped you and made you who you are even if you fail to realize it.
The belief that nationalism is arbitrary and useless is necessarily the product of ignorance insofar it betrays a lack of who one is as an individual or awareness of the alternatives.
