Thicken your skin...develop a sense of humor...and just chill out.

[Phil]

Identity is a very precious thing without which you cannot really define your place in the world. Totalitarian regimes recognise this and seek to control populations by bending their identities to suit their particular purpose. Less controlling regimes seek to do this also but in more subtle ways such as educating children in the new ways, imposing their own forms of religion, suppressing and actively discouraging the use of language and other such more long term methods. The aim is the same, however, and that is to bend the will of the minority to that of the controlling power.
Examples in Scotland, pre-devolution, might be the prohibition of tartan after 1745, the continuing discrimination against the native languages, Gaelic and Scots, in both education and society generally. Children were still being smacked in school in my younger days for using the language of their birth. Jock Scot recounts poignantly being ridiculed as a child for wearing a kilt, something I too have been aware of in the past.
This is not something peculiar to us here in Scotland. A civil war was fought in America over one part wanting to secede and preserve their own identity, whether for good or bad. Schools there to this day indoctrinate pupils daily in allegiance to the flag as a way of amalgamating diverse ethnic groups into one nation. I am not saying this is in any way bad, just to recognise the process.
Little wonder then that people would fight to retain what is left of their identity against such institutionalised attack and jealously guard it. Our Scots identity is not your identity and, while you may casually ignore it, we cannot. But please remember these lines:-
“First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Just replace any of these with Scot, native American, Hispanic whatever before casually dismissing anyones aspirations to express and own their identity in the face of such organised and overwhelming opposition.
And finally, regardless of any disclaimer to the contrary by the perpetrator, I think no one here is in any doubt as to whom the recent attacks were directed. As he is probably much more profitably employed today, the "Glorious Twelfth" blasting every grouse in sight I can only wish him "Good shooting".