A NATION UNDER ATTACK
01/07/2013 17:53
Narcissus would have been a perfect Dane. Danes love Denmark. Most people love the country they are born, raised and live in, of course. But most people also know that other people love their countries too, so meetings between nationalities can take place in the nice and orderly fashion that grows from mutual respect.
For some reason, Danes think that everybody in the whole world loves Denmark more than they love their own country. And that, given the chance, all 7 billion earthlings would stampede across our borders and graze mercilessly on our green pastures of free education, free healthcare and high level of social security.
In reality, a lot of countries around the world offer the same amount of opportunities to their inhabitants. And a lot of countries are even better at it than we are. But that side of the story never really got through to Danes.
To make matters worse, Danes are so full of admiration for their own achievements that they consider it an act of aggression to diverge from the common way of doing even the smallest and insignificant things in daily life. We’ve even got a word for it – udansk – meaning ‘un-Danish’. It comes with a detailed sketch of the borders of acceptable behaviour and woe to the one that crosses them by as much as a millimetre (that’s 1/26 of an inch, to those of you not familiar with the metric system).
Take the various sorts of religious apparel that are as much a part of the Danish landscape as most countries around the world. If you ask me, you can wear whatever you like as long as you wear something and as long as it’s consensual. Neither nudity nor repression should be encouraged. But for the vast majority of Danes a hijab or a niqab is a direct attack – a flapping standard in front of a crusade that threatens to wipe out the Danish way of life.
The result is a lot of screaming and yelling and throwing people off buses.
Actually, only one thing can upset a Dane more than seeing someone wearing the ‘wrong’ headgear: never, EVER jump the queue at the bakery on a Sunday morning. You probably won’t get out of that one alive.
