Independence

It's the Finnish independence day today (6th of December) and Finland is turning 89. And as corny as it is, I think independence days are good days to reflect on the whole concept on a personal level. I myself aren't that patriotic a person - those who know me will undoubtedly consider this quite worthy of an Understatement of the Year award. The problem that I have with all this overly patriotic stuff is that it just promotes nationalism. Nationalism itself may or may not be a good ideology, I guess that's still up in the air, but there are problems that it causes. Nearly always there are nationalistic ideals behind racist behaviour, national stereotypes are often funny, but also insulting, and wars/conflicts more often then not have nationalistic zeal in the background.

On a similar parallel, the Olympics and other sporting events that promote competition between nations often result in bigotry - "Damn svensktalande bättre folk, go back to Swedenland and learn to play ice hockey!" I don't remember when I've last watched any sporting event between nations. But the whole nationalistic element in sports doesn't further global integration and interaction.

EU has also been a controversial topic in Finland, at least within certain groups. There are quite many people who are fairly skeptical of the benefits that EU has to offer. That's of course understandable, if the default mindset is that "I'm primarily a Finn and proud of it". That mindset should change to "I'm a European and proud of it". At least that would be a step in the right direction. And hopefully eventually we'd reach a global mindset and we would consider ourselves as citizens of the same world, regardless of the region where you live. And at this point, I guess I could go run in some beauty pageant and tell about my vision of peace on earth. Luckily I'm cynical enough to take all of this with a grain of salt and acknowledge the fact that because of human nature, this will never happen.

Now, don't get me wrong, independence is nice and everything, but I just feel that some things that are pretty integral to the concept of independence are very negative and might even overshadow some of the good things. As such, I didn't celebrate independence in any special way; I just lied in bed with my laptop, surfing the web, listening to music, etc. Might've had something to do with the fact that we had our Christmas party with some of the trainees from N...