Looking back again

It’s amazing how long a nation can live with a bad idea. And how that idea ages, sours, rots and attracts all sorts of rodents. Of course I’m talking about Brexit. I was ten years younger when I watched the Newcastle results from a hotel room in Anstruther, where I was taking part in a workshop organised by Mozilla with people from all over the world.

I would later spend almost £1.5K to get naturalised in January 2018. I learnt how to deal with import/export/duty to the EU & US for a client. I pay incredible amounts of duty on parcels to Canada now. Some of my favourite bands stopped travelling to the UK. Some friends moved away with their European partners or plan to leave as soon as their Irish passport comes through. Others lost their jobs and had to move back to where they came from because of their work visas. The list of losses is long.

The problem is that loss turns into shame and we know where that takes us. In Albert Bandura’s Moral Disengagement, Why People Do Harm and Live With Themselves (2015) he states in the introduction:

Because individuals have to live with themselves, they strive to preserve a self-view as decent, self-respecting people. There is no self-view more personally devastating than self-loathing. 

I’m sure time will need to pass before we add Brexit to our history books and describe it as a period of deep isolation and self-loathing. But only 1,500 took to the streets last weekend to ask for change. None of my friends went as far as I’m aware. I didn’t hear about it until I started writing this post. The silence is deafening.

Theresa May accused people like me of being citizens of nowhere, but I think we’ve turned the country into a Nowhere Man instead. Without a point of view, blind as we can be. Hoping someone else has a plan for us. Ideally based on our past glories. I’m sure they’re there if you go back far enough.