The death of hope is a balm

[andrewducker]

After three years of increasing stress watching Brexit approach, be deflected, go up against numerous crunch votes, and not quite make it through, the knowledge that it's happening has been actually very helpful for my mental health.

Now, whenever I see an item about the latest stupidity I take in the headline, snort about what idiots they are, and move on. It feels very much Not My Problem.

I mean, it will be. It will be everyone's. But now it's an approaching storm that I can get on with battening down the hatches for. It is an inevitable part of the future, not something I should be trying to stop.

In some ways it feels the same as the ending of some of my relationships - endless stressing about how to fix things (and whether they can be fixed) is now over and the heartbreak is nowhere near as bad as the stress was.

I realise that my ability to put in place survival mechanisms is a sign of privilege. The people who will be hit worst by this are the poorest and most precarious. I'll do what I can to help people when it comes clear what that help looks like. But at the moment I mostly just feel the relief of knowing the fight is over and we lost.

Comments

[aldabra]

Yes, I have this. I've been stuck in anger and bargaining for years. I think depression and acceptance take much less energy.

[helen_keeble]

I’m planning to donate heavily to the organisations trying to help European residents of England. I have a friend who has been here for over 20 years and who is an academic specialising in English history, and he will probably have to leave because his settled status application requires him to have extortionately expensive private health cover. Heaven only knows how people with fewer resources and networks are supposed to get through the process.

(they aren’t, of course. That’s the whole point of all of this)

[drplokta]

But the new fight begins on 1 February, and will eventually win, when the good old days that are dimly remembered by sixty- and seventy- somethings who are confusing their own life trajectory with the state of the nation involve EU membership. I’m afraid it may take twenty or thirty years, though.

[andrewducker]

I am very curious to see what happens when the people who lived through the Winter of Discontent die off, as that's going to change our voter profiles a lot.

[drplokta]

I’m afraid I won’t get to see what happens when those voters die, because I’m one of them.

[andrewducker]

Let's hope you're one of the longer lived ones!

[cmcmck]

I'm also one of those sixtysomethings and know a lot of other sixtysomethings who don't think like these imbeciles.

It may have to do with being working class in origin and growing up in a council prefab in the Medway towns (which I know you know). What good old days?

[alithea]

This is pretty much how I feel too - hoping everyone would come to their senses was more painful and their failure to do so endlessly frustrating.

[dewline]

This is the journey I expect myself and Canada to have to make if Trump gets his second term as US president. The sense that my own country will have been murdered by the federal election next door, and we will have no recourse, is palpable right now.

Survival mechanisms?

[channelpenguin]

I feel very sad, at Brexit itself, at what the whole saga has shown up about how the people have been helped to fool themselves, at all the extra suffering that will take place.

I am staying in Germany, I don't care what. I would rather not change nationality, but if I have to, I will (but I can't for a couple of years yet in any case). I am glad that Germany has a shortage of skilled software developers, and will be almost certainly likely to make it easy for me to say (and keep paying those nice juicy taxes). Not all will be so lucky. I have my fingers crossed.

[cmcmck]

I now regret not staying an extra three months in Belgium when I lived there back in the seventies. That would have given me dual nationality- go for it if you can!

[autopope]

While I sympathise with the sentiment, I think there's a much bigger, scarier picture lurking in the background.

Brexit is part of the global right wing/nationalist resurgence. A core chunk of their platform (if you can call it that) is closing down borders and truncating international supply chains. And we have a background of runaway climate change. There's a drumbeat of anti-immigrant rhetoric everywhere, and it's only going to get worse: this is the background to Brexit.

A lock-down on immigration in a time of climate change is tantamount to genocide. Not by death camp, but by starvation/heatstroke, forcing people to try to survive in climactic conditions that are unsurvivable.

This isn't a world I can accept.

[agoodwinsmith]

I fear you are correct.

[channelpenguin]

While I doubt it is a/the deliberate plan (at least not for those precise reasons), I agree with your conclusion.

[autopope]

Ethnonationalists — especially white supremacists — are intensely okay with Other Folks doing the dying.

Currently in the English-speaking nations the white supremacists still pay lip service to disbelief in anthropogenic climate change. I expect that to flip within the next 1-5 years, and go from denial ("there's no problem") to retribution ("it's the mud people's fault for breeding and consuming all the resources — if people are going to die, we need to make sure it's them who do the dying, and not us"). At which point, the next version of Trump or Johnson will go full-bore for "let them die, that leaves more resources for us".

[zz]

part of me is still holding out hope we'll have a civil war, or just straight out rwandan genocide style cleansing of the brexiteers.

i'm not sure i'm capable of accepting there are millions of people *that* stupid just indistinguishably walking around like they're normal.