BenPaddon.co.uk

As much fun as I had in England visiting friends and family, there was this horrible feeling I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t anything to do with the people I was with, but rather it was about England, about Luton. It felt uncomfortable, it felt nasty, and it felt unsafe.

There’s an image most Brits like to have of Americans: by most Brits’ standards, Americans are generally loutish, selfish, intolerant and racist. I can’t speak for the majority of America but so far as California is concerned I’ve yet to see any evidence of this intolerance. It’s telling of British society today that within an hour of landing at Heathrow Airport and getting on a coach, someone shouted “Oi! Ginga!” at me, with the obligatory soft-Gs. it was, frankly, sickening. Another wonderful moment occurred during a walk into Luton’s town centre when someone who presumably thought I was Polish stuck their head out of their van’s window and shouted at me to go back to my own country. I remember feeling so angry about that.

British people also have this idea of the Stupid American, who has all the cognitive skills of a particularly unintelligent box of potatoes. Honestly, I think I’ve met and spoken to more dumb Brits in my time than I have dumb Americans. While the UK:US ratio is skewed (I’ve obviously met more Brits than I have Americans) I’m generally of the opinion that idiots exist everywhere, not just in one country. And the UK has plenty.

Now, I’m not trying to make this an Anti-Britain/pro-American thing. It isn’t. It’s more a look at the state of British culture. The intolerant manner I was treated by many in England is one of the reasons I left. No one here has thus far made fun of the colour of my hair. No one has thrown a beer bottle at me, or tried to mug me because I have ginger hair. Why it socially acceptable to do these things in England? Why is that? Why is it whenever a ginger-haired person is bullied, or beaten, or mugged, or mocked, simply because of the colour of their hair, they’re told to just get over it, or grow thicker skin.

Sometimes, I am very ashamed of my generation of Brits. Sometimes, in all honestly, I’m ashamed of Britain as a whole. Where did it all go wrong?