To be a Scottish patriot, especially nowadays, it seems that you:
Have to know the very songs, poems and stories that help us to be authentic and stand out amongst the crowd (good thing).
Have to read about and respect the many poets, artists, musicians, comedians, inventors, sportsmen & sportswomen,
soldiers and leaders that help make our country have a great image worth looking up to (again, good thing).Have an annual celebration and holiday included to celebrate a particular figure or historical event (good thing). Hogmanay does count too.
Have to know and taste the food & drinks that define Scotland (e.g. Haggis, IRN BRU, Whiskey, Shortbread Biscuits, Tenants Beer, Deep-fried Mars Bar, Neeps & Tatties, Salmon, Porridge, Full Scottish Breakfast, Tunnock's Tea Cakes, Scottish Tablet, Lorne Sausage, Leek and Tattie Soup, Bacon Butty, Scotch Pie, etc, another good thing).
Wear the clothes that define your country’s identity (good thing because being asked to lift a male version of a skirt for any flirty women doesn't quite apply elsewhere, right?).
Pledge your allegiance to defend your country if another hostile nation or empire threatens to take it over
(that is, just stand up to the union of the United Kingdom, not anything else like the European Union or any other sector that would help to form an eventual world government. It's all got to be about unity of a different kind.).Proudly fight for and declare the independence once overdue but then happily sell away the much-needed sovereignty to the European Union because that Union is far more better than what the Torys have at Westminster.
Defend Free Speech (that is, defend only your right to speak freely, not the right to free speech of anyone else you disagree with like Pro-UK Unionists, Right-Wingers and Torys).
Defend the reputation of your elected leaders & politicians even if they do something wrong and/or are corrupt.
Defend every band & musician in Scotland you know of from those that dislike your country's music (even if some of them do turn out to be absolutely crap, deep down in your thoughts).
Defend football as the main and only sport that your fellow Scots and tourists should like, even if Rugby, Golf, Shinty, Field Hockey, Ice Hockey, Curling, Cycling, Running and the Highland Games also exist because modest to highly paid football players, managers, commentators and presenters have to come first.
Defend Rockstar Games & Grand Theft Auto at first (Rockstar North originated from Dundee as DMA Design) but then, turn against them because 'guns and violence are bad!'.
Defend Primary and Secondary Schools which are funded via taxpayer money and denounce those that want to send their kids to private schools, even if Primary and Secondary Schools have their obvious disadvantages. Homeschooling has to be denounced too (unless there are exemptions).
Verbally shut down any discussions, especially those with opposing views, regarding Climate Change/Global Warming,
Living/Minimum Wage, COVID-19, Vaccines, The long term impact of the Welfare State, Trump, other right-wing leaders, the EU, NATO, the UN, Foreign aid, Guns, Knives, AntiFa, Russia, the organisation known as Black Lives Matter, the NHS, Universal Basic Income, etc.Oppose any leader or public figure who is, or is perceived to be, Right-Wing, racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic,
islamophobic, sectarian, anti-Semitic, ‘holocaust denier’, ‘climate change denier’, ‘dangerous’, etc.Shout that you’ll defend your country all day long but in the same breath openly call for the disarming of your
fellow men & women via gun control (including small restrictions with licenses). If anyone wants to dispute the idea of gun control, even with facts, documents and statistics to prove that gun control doesn't work with deaths more likely from other violent scenarios, just keep on accusing them of siding with the evil, careless Gun Lobby and remind them to 'THINK OF THE WEANS THAT DIED AT DUNBLANE!!!" in order to shut them up. Keep on forgetting about the Disarming Act of 1716 which happened during the Jacobite Uprising.On that note of self-defense, guns may be banned and knives may be still oot there and of course you will get arrested & charged for 'assault' if you dare to defend your property from a real violent criminal with the possibility of a jail sentence involved but casually & openly threatening to batter your kids (schoolchildren & teenagers if you are a teacher), your partner/spouse, your parents, your in-laws, your in-laws' kids, your neighbours, your pranking work colleagues, the tradesman that really winds you up after hiring him for the job and anyone you dislike for any reason in the pub - actually people that try to steal the maybe future love of your life or mating partner is still OK.
Shut down & cancel businesses, even small businesses, that you dislike. The Lockdown since March 2020 has proved to be a good scenario for trying that out. Of course Chick-fil-A has great food from America but they still have to be boycotted or else! No matter how much that small business owner says they have to make a living or go bust, likely leading them towards a life of poverty for them and their families, just report them - that'll sort them out.
Openly call for communism or socialism, or even just for left-wing policies which cover up the true intentions, which involves evicting landowners you don’t like.
Call for hunters to be banned and stripped of their shotguns because they're all a bunch of Tory-supporting rich aristocrats who don't give a stuff about wild animals & think of them as trophies (don't tell your mates about your neighbour living in the same middle class or working class neighbourhood as you or nearby in a different street being occasionally hired by farmers to deal with pests in the night, though, better keep it a secret).
Call for off-grid stoves, fireworks, fossil-fuel-powered cars, vans, LGVs, and eventually lorries & planes (BBQs are on the list too) to be banned.
Call for banners, flags, groups, individual public figures, marches and parades you don’t like to be banned.
Loudly virtue-signal all day, especially on social media, about how much you ‘care’ (this brings in the moral
superiority complex) about children, women, the disabled, LGBT people, those who aren’t white-skinned, the elderly, safe spaces, EU Citizens, people from the third world, etc. Men, after you finished loudly defending women's rights, feel free to remove the mask and keep on slagging women off about them taking your jobs and maybe, who knows, taking over the world at the expense of men.Keep boasting about how you envy getting a great fitness level similar to an athlete, footballer, rugby player or bodybuilder (talent can apply) but then state how your lifestyle is better so you won't get there. Keep eating those unhealthy foods you love - the other love of your life will probably have to come last.
And finally, anyone who says they are a Scottish Patriot but do not fit any of the above points is be smeared at, despised of and screamed at until they leave and back away from the group. Of course, there is the option of calling for them to be banned from any public platform.
On a serious note, our much more recent issues on how patriotic we're supposed to be are no different to the cultural difficulties American citizens had to face whenever their elite presidents engaged in similar, if not worse, antics.
Throughout the times of the administrations of both President Bushes in the USA, the average American citizen was viewed as being less of a patriot if you dared to disagree with them & their policies, especially on wars. These days, the yanks finally awakened to their corruption.
Since 2007, we have had the SNP rise to power claiming to stand with us and our national interests but just like the many other mainstream political parties are on track to implement similar forms of eventual (mainly helping out to create worldwide) authoritarianism, just from a different side of the same coin. The same reaction from the masses of you (supposedly) being less of a patriot for daring to disagree with the SNP & The Scottish Green Party is overall no different to the treatment an American gets when he/she disagrees with both George Bushes, even Obama, Clinton and any other president.
If the real principles of freedom & liberty were to be fully understood by us through researching how the American founding fathers may have had their ideas influenced by the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 AD, we would be completely abandoning all membership & support for the mainstream parties in our droves & finding either alternative parties or independent candidates with real principles, principles that they perhaps deep down know that one day they may have to pay the price for believing, thinking and demonstrating them in front of a political establishment that will take huge exception to (e.g. fines, bans, jail time, even death at the most extreme).
To end in short, disagreeing with Nicola Sturgeon about the Lockdown with very harsh reactions back is now comparable to what anti-war activists & pro-liberty thinkers got after 9/11 happened when they tried to warn their fellow US citizens about which freedoms would be taken away bit by bit until there would be none left after George W. Bush signed the controversial Patriot Act into law after it was passed by both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.
Many of us speaking out against the Lockdown and eventual removal of bodily privacy & free speech can only hope & pray that history does not repeat itself, only much more worse than before.
NOTE: On the latter section of my point about hunters, please take notice that I was not calling for violence against hunters at all, that is not my intention. I was merely repeating some views I saw from some Scots environmentalists online and emphasized about what extreme views may come next. Also, I fully understand that not every Scot that loves Alba ends up fitting those descriptions but it seems that the cultural requirements in the current year seem to fit those 'requirements'.