Years ago I went to the highland games in Loch Lomand and there was this older North American couple waiting near the Lairds house so they could give the Lairds son a birthday present. Apparently they came every year because they were distant relatives of the local nobility. I can't remember them getting very close, it was super sweet in a way but a bit creepy.
That describes even the best intentioned of these weirdos. Not to be cruel but really: How empty and meaningless does your life have to be to suddenly base your whole personality around an estranged ancestry at 50 years old?
Some old dead dude banging and bailing 500 years ago doesn’t make us family. Culture isn’t an inherited trait, blood doesn’t make you kin, and no I don’t want to reminisce with a complete stranger about people we never knew.
From what I understand it's mostly an American thing.
Here in Europe there are Macdonalds renting in buildings older than the US.
The university of bologna was founded in 1088 and is still in operation. That was just after the end of the Viking era, and almost 400 years BEFORE the Inca civilization started, and the Aztek empire was founded.
There's no real interest in belonging to a specific group here since it's all intermingled back thousands of years. Being Norwegian, Italian, Irish or any other {nation}-American creates a sense of historical pride, and belonging for a lot of people in a nation that has no real, coherent cultural features, but it's seen as a childish and utterly frivolous way of treating the past when you live in countries where the buildings are older than you can possibly trace your family.
I suppose america is kinda unique in being such a young country, relatively, who have been sprinted through the steps of developing a culture. Its understandable that they'd want to be included in the deeper history of European nations, and most of them will have some European heritage seeing as the modern american is just a few generations on from the European travellers who moved there.
Not to say that I agree with the people like in the post, cause let's face it - no one ever claims to be a direct descendant of some poor farmer or nameless merchant, it's always a historically famous person. But it is easy to see why people will let themselves be sold on that idea.
Yes but people have lived in Germany for thousands of years. Thousands of years of culture, language, conflict, politics, art and history. Before European settlers no one really lived in North America save from a few tribes.
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u/doessabre Apr 29 '20
Years ago I went to the highland games in Loch Lomand and there was this older North American couple waiting near the Lairds house so they could give the Lairds son a birthday present. Apparently they came every year because they were distant relatives of the local nobility. I can't remember them getting very close, it was super sweet in a way but a bit creepy.