I gotta be honest, I find the point of view that says "It would have been better if I were accosted by a native-born national" fascinating. It's like being a l

I gotta be honest, I find the point of view that says "It would have been better if I were accosted by a native-born national" fascinating. It's like being a lot happier getting half your crops taken by the local king instead of a wandering warlord, or burned at the stake by God-fearing Christians instead of "heathens." It's a kind of belief in a specific just order of reality that I don't think I'm in a place in my life journey to feel. There's a fascinating book called Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson that talks about the place nationalism took in the zeitgeist of much of humanity, displacing previous tribe-structuring concepts of shared faith, same-village origin, or vassaldom to the local lord. Reading between the lines, it makes an interesting case that nationhood, while a useful fiction (it gives a person in East London a reason to care about the fate of someone they will definitely never meet in the Falkland Islands and made experiments like "The British Empire" possible), is no less a fiction than the people-unifying stories that came before. And if the fiction is making a person care more about the fate of someone they'll never meet on an island in the Patagonian Shelf in the South Atlantic Ocean than a person who is so physically near to them that they just stole their laptop... Maybe the story could use some tweaking, yeah?