Pebbles on the Edge

Pebbles on the Edge
Lake McDonald, 2014

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Saor Alba Gu Brath! Freedom for Scotland in Our Lifetime?

Brataichean na h-Alba air na Criochan


Finally! Finally, Scotland may be--WILL be able to determine her own course, after so many centuries as the thrall of England. It matters not the blood, for there is no pure anything anymore and never was. Robert de Brus was Anglo-Norman. William Wallace was a North Briton. What does matter is the sense of identity and self worth a people have. It's not who we are as much as what we believe.

For nearly all of my life, even as a kid, although I have perhaps three-eighths "Scottish" blood amid the Welsh and Scandanavian, I have identified myself as Scottish. Don't ask me why because I don't know. (It wasn't brainwashing from Dad either!!!)

It was only when I became an adult and began to study and understand just what it means to be Scottish--to "hae even a wee drap o' the bluid", diluted as it is by a hundred-sixty-one years and other bloodlines (most of them British in some way)--that I could see just how wrong the Union was.

Freedom for Scotland means much more than having a place to call home. It means restoration of a nation's sovereignty and independence. This is not secession from Great Britain or a divorce from the Union. There should never have been a marriage in the first place. It was a shotgun wedding, made under duress, and should be annuled, with reparations.

How will it end?

I remember how it began, this new movement, this confidence after so long beneath the thumb and contempt of England...

I just happened to be watching TV in 1999, the day the devolved Scottish Parliament opened, and I cried like a baby when Sheena Wellington sang Rabbie Burns' "A Man's a Man for A' That", and then to see everyone in the place stand and fill it with one of the greatest songs ever written! (I learned it as sung by the Corries, those great musical revolutionaries, one of whom wrote "Flower of Scotland")

"So, here's tae us, man. Wha's like us? Damn few, and they're a' deid!"

Here's to a living, breathing, sovereign Scotland, a real nation again. Not without problems--freedom is a messy business. But the Scots have proven their mettle all around the world. Let them prove it at home, without England.


The following video lays to rest some of the fictions manufactured by those who wish to stay with the status quo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?src_vid=iINm7mtg8BE&annotation_id=annotation_885265&feature=iv&v=5udgzGhkvT4

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