National Pride, Freedom, Liberty - What does that all look like?

I live in a former communist country, a region still recovering from a decades long war, a region known as the tinder box for the last 200 years.  My country has seen many different forms of government, it has been occupied by countless foreign invaders (including the 20th century).  The capitol city (my home) has been destroyed and rebuilt to many times to count.  Despite all this there is a strong national pride amongst these people.  With 35 years of patriotism and American pride as my lens, I have to say I have seen nothing like the national pride here.  Everyone has it, it crosses all lines (granted there are a lot less lines here ethnic, religous, political).  The place where this is most evident is in sport.  These folks support their national teams in every sport all the time (not just during the Olympics).   When their team is playing they are all watching, soccer, basketball, volleyball, water polo - it does not matter.  Thursday I was running errands and noticed everyone at the cafe watching t.v. and thought "oh they must be watching USA vs. Russia in the FIBA games" (still a little American centric and probably always will be!), but no, they were watching their team in the European water polo championships!  Every time something happened the place exploded, it was insane - over water polo.  This got me thinking why do we (Americans) not support our teams like this?  Well lets just say in about 5 minutes I had about 100 reasons so I stopped thinking about it, but one thing that I kept coming back to is we have a different sense of freedom and liberty then the people here.  We have an expectation of freedom, it is all we know.  We don't have an experience like the people here.  Just being my age, if you grew up here you know communism and war.  I probably will never know either.  So I'm thinking about freedom and I realize as Americans we still don't know freedom as a country - we know a shadow or a type of freedom that we created but true freedom is for the individual and can be had anywhere - it's simple its called Christ!  2 Corinthians 3:17 says Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  Read that again, freedom is not in a country or a constitution or anything else we create, Freedom is where the spirit of the Lord is.  We can all have freedom, accepting Christ as Lord = FREEDOM (feel free to scream that like William Wallace).  This is something I knew, but it means so much more to me now, being here.  Think about this new view of Freedom, think how it can impact your life and search and determine do you have it? do you want it?