Each month we will be featuring a guest writer and this month is Andrew McDiarmid, born and bred in Edinburgh, Scotland, currently living in South Texas. He has a radio show in Texas called Simply Scottish. However, he is a writer, and currently writes regular columns for U.S Scots Magazine in America, and Now You Know!, a feature in a newspaper based in Lanarkshire, Scotland.
| "Andrew," my mother whispered. "Andrew, wake up - we're going to America."
When two people collaborate on the creating of a song, they don't have to be
married to make the song work. They simply need to share similar interests,
common goals, and a desire to respectfully compromise when the need arises.
Such should be the case with Scotland and England. They need not be married
to trade with, defend, collaborate, and help eachother.
When two famous artists get together to collaborate on a song, the most
exciting aspect is not the finished product, but the fact that the two
individual artists got together. They didn't have to become one entity
("Britain") - they simply combined themselves to create something new. Then
they returned to being individual artists again. ("Scotland" and "England") I don't think so. Yet this is exactly what has happened with Scotland and England. England were not content to have a collaboration with Scotland. They wanted marriage, and they forced it and played on the weaknesses of Scotland at that time to achieve it. Then they called the shots, eliminated any opposition, assumed a role of dominance, and waited for it to sink in. Now, they couldn't be happier. They control what comes in and out of the relationship. They have succeeded in breaking down all sense of national borders. They call it "one country", and they are delighted at the fact that most of the civilized world refer to the two "united" countries as simply "England". Looking back at history, whose idea was it anyway to become a single entity (Britain)? Was it some enterprising Englishman who had acccepted the fact that control and domination of Scotland wasn't happening through centuries of war and pillage, but could easily be acheived through the pretense of "becoming a United Kingdom"? And did this Englishman also craftily forsee that all the good, the praised, and the amazing that came out of Scotland would automatically be filtered through one channel, that of the single English-dominated entity of "Britain"? When Scotland produced the world's first cloned animal, the world's media did not report "Scottish scientist clones sheep". Instead, the headline read: "British scientists create world's first cloned animal". How marvelously convenient! (To Be Continued)
|
If you would like to contact Andrew he can be reached here
You can find more articles in the archive under Guest Writer's Corner
| Home | New | Table of Contents | Search | Archive |