I used to have this kid as a colleague (he was 17 at the time), who had been primed by his parents to be a nationalist.

One of the times, he was completely bewildered by my stance was when I said that even if I cared about having things in common with other humans, I feel like I have more in common with the folks just across the border than those who live several hundred kilometers away within the same border.

You could really see the cogs in his brain churning, trying to grok how you can have things in common with team B, when you’ve been assigned to team A.

All the contententious debates like these start to fall apart when you think about it too much and realize that these problems only exist because some idiots a few centuries ago made some selfish decisions and we keep insisting on perpetuating them