THESE last couple of weeks, something remarkable has been happening on the other side of the Atlantic – and it’s not the football really. Around 50,000 Scotland fans, kilted, bagpiped, and armed with an apparently inexhaustible supply of good cheer, have been turning American cities inside out.
Boston ran out of beer. Traffic cones appeared on statues. “No Scotland, No Party” became the unofficial slogan of a World Cup that, for once, Scotland actually qualified for.
The mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, adopted the phrase as her own and announced plans to make Glasgow and Boston sister cities. Locals queued for selfies with strangers in tartan.
But this isn’t just a story about football fans having a good time. It’s something more specific than that, and it’s worth naming.
The Tartan Army haven’t simply descended on the United States and filled it with noise. They have given something back.
Before their opening match against Haiti, fans were dancing in the streets with Haitian supporters, not despite the fact that their teams were about to face each other, but seemingly because of the joy of the occasion itself. When Scotland played Morocco, the same spirit was on display, with fans from both nations celebrating together before and after the final whistle.
Videos shared widely on social media showed Tartan Army fans exchanging Highland dancing for the Norwegian Viking rowing gesture with Norwegian supporters, learning from each other as much as sharing their own traditions.
And through the Tartan Army Sunshine Appeal, a tradition of of more than 20 years, fans raised and donated more than $26,500 to causes in Providence alone: $10,000 to the Hasbro Children’s Hospital cancer unit, described by staff as one of the largest donations they had ever received, $10,000 to a grassroots football programme for underprivileged children, and $6500 to fund a bagpipe education programme for local young people.
Even the traffic cones, the most gloriously Scottish of traditions, the one thing a cynic might call cultural imposition, tell a different story. Boston didn’t just tolerate it. They embraced it, laughed with it, posed for photographs beside it. The mayor praised her Scottish guests for loving and caring for the city’s public spaces.
That raises a question worth considering for a moment: what made that possible?
The answer, at least in part, is that the Tartan Army showed up generously. They came not to take over but to share, not to ignore their hosts but to delight in them. Boston responded in kind.
What resulted was something neither side could have manufactured alone, a genuine, mutual, joyful exchange between people who had never met and might never meet again.
What does that teach us about how to welcome people into our communities?
Hold that thought, because on the same Friday night that Scotland faced Morocco in Boston, June 19, five men were attacked across Edinburgh. Two of the victims had just left prayers at Broomhouse Mosque in Sighthill.
A counterterrorism investigation was launched. First Minister John Swinney called on people to “stand united in utter condemnation” of the attacks, stating plainly that “anti-Muslim hatred is abhorrent, and we must not allow recent attempts to stoke fear to divide us”.
Muslim communities across Scotland spoke of shock, alarm, and a profound sense of fear. The Scottish Association of Mosques described it as the latest in an alarming pattern of hostility and violence directed at Muslims across the country.
TWO Scotlands, the same Friday night. One spreading joy across an ocean. One leaving people afraid to leave their homes.
It would be easy, and dishonest, to pretend these are simply opposites that cancel each other out. They don’t. Both are real. The overwhelming majority of people in this country are decent, generous, and genuinely horrified by what happened in Edinburgh.
Most Scots watching the Tartan Army this week will have felt proud. Most will also feel sickened by the violence on our streets. Those things can be true at the same time.
But I can’t help thinking that feeling sickened, privately, is not enough. One of the most corrosive features of the current moment, the rise of far-right rhetoric, the normalisation of dehumanising language about Muslims, about migrants, about anyone marked as “other”, is that it depends on the silence of the majority to take hold.
Hate doesn’t need everyone’s approval. It only needs enough people to look away.
As someone who works in education, I worry about what our children and young people are making of all of this.
They are watching both things simultaneously: the joy and the fear, the welcome and the attack, and they are drawing conclusions about what the world is, and what adults think is acceptable.
Children who grow up seeing racism go unchallenged don’t necessarily become racists themselves. But they do learn that silence is a reasonable response. That it’s someone else’s problem. That speaking up carries a cost that most people aren’t willing to pay.
The Tartan Army has shown us something different. They showed us what it looks like to meet strangers with openness rather than suspicion, to share rather than impose, to give something back to every place they pass through.
That’s not just good behaviour, it’s a set of values enacted in public, repeatedly, in front of the whole world. And it works. Not because Americans are infinitely patient hosts, but because generosity met generosity and something genuinely beautiful is coming out of it, even now as we see the army move to Miami.
That dynamic is available to us at home too. It doesn’t require a World Cup or a kilt. It requires the willingness to speak when we see something wrong, to check in on a neighbour who might be frightened, to make clear, out loud, not just in our heads, that the Scotland we believe in is the one on the streets of Boston, not the one that left people afraid to leave a mosque in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The minority spreading hate are loud. But they are a minority. The question is whether the rest of us are willing to be louder.
This week, tens of thousands of Scotland fans in kilts and carrying bagpipes have shown the world exactly what this country’s values look like when we live them out loud.
The national team that wore the Scotland shirt, with all the resilience, grace and pride they have brought to every match, did the same. If we can get behind them with that much joy and that much heart, we can surely find the courage to protect those same values on our own streets, in our own communities, for everyone who calls Scotland home.
Nuzhat Uthmani is a teacher and lecturer at the University of Stirling.
David Pratt returns next week
