Patriotism vs foolhardiness

Watching horror movies (foreign of course) for me is very exhausting. Too many highs, nerves and extreme tension, Very common and baffling every time I watch is that every time something bad is clearly about to happen, the characters always want to confront or at least see what’s going on or what the terror is (whether they are afraid or not). As much I try not to compare, I cannot help but imagine Nigerians faced with like situations, if we hear gun shots anywhere, we would NEVER head towards the shot to “find out” what the situation is, we will either take cover, or run fast and hard. Unlike the movie characters that are inquisitive to know what’s making that eerie sound and go ahead to ‘look for the trouble’. This morning, on our way to work, around a couple of minutes after 5am, I was still very much sleepy and was dozing. The next thing I felt was the car came to an abrupt halt and started reversing, tensed, I immediately opened my eyes, looking around, I asked him why he was reversing and he pointed just ahead of us, there was a crowd of about 100 people at 5am, they were standing in the middle of the road, I saw some holding sticks. Yep, that was enough reason to reverse and escape. We were not particularly interested in “investigating”, instead more of safety first. We took the next exit. What makes Americans, for example, so brave and patriotic such that they are prepared to die, especially for their country? Maybe because of the history of the list of the many unappreciated and unsung heroes of our country, heroism isn’t exactly high on our mental scale of preference. Are we ever going to be patriotic? Is it ever going to happen?