England Made Me. And England Will Break Me

(note: this is basically a jumble. I need to write something, so this is something. If you’re looking for a great piece of writing that sums up how I feel in a better way, I direct you to Tom Ewing’s fabulous A to Z on the matter)

“Here, the intersection of the timeless moment is England and nowhere. Never and always.”

Watching your country crumble to dust on live television is, if nothing else, something. Exciting in the way that a 9.5 Earthquake is exciting in the brief seconds before it turns to terror. You could see it on the faces of Dimbleby and others on the BBC broadcast as Newcastle reported its results, and in the poor teller at Sunderland, her voice barely holding together as she signalled the defeat of Remain with only the second mainland result of the night. The hour before where we laughed about the 823 leavers in Gibraltar seemed another age ago.

Then the last three days, staggering tales of abuse, starting with children and teenagers turning on their parents, yelling ‘what have you done to us?', swiftly escalating as stories of non-Britons being told to fuck off back home, pork thrown into the gardens of British Muslims, and worse. Many of these people have lived in the country for years, decades, born here even. As much right to live in the country as any of us. Suddenly other and subject to abuse that would not normally be acceptable. What has happened to us?

Things getting more and more insane, the pound experiencing the biggest drop since records began, market chaos, our Prime Minister toddling off into the sunset yelling ‘fuckitybye!' in the general of Boris Johnson. Scotland running for the exits, Ian Paisley Jr. suggesting that people get Irish passports. I struggle to tell my American friends just how crazy that last sentence is to somebody who grew up during the Troubles.

I hate their hot takes, their casting of Brexit in the light of their own problems, whether it be Trump or Black Lives Matter, not even managing to determine the difference between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and getting petulant when somebody points out their mistake. It is apparently a victory for the left against the neoliberal European Union. It doesn’t feel like that here, or on the ground back home, especially as the Labour Party continues its stellar approach of approaching a crisis by jumping off the nearest cliff.

I feel alien. The United States is my home now, but it is not my real home. But that will soon be gone forever. Scotland will leave now, that much is almost certain, and who can blame them? The UK as I grew up in will be cast into a faded memory, three hundred years of Union blown up in order to bolster David Cameron’s re-election chances. Prime Minister Johnson of the United Kingdom of England, Wales, and perhaps N. Ireland. But isn’t he a legend, they will say.

In the end it’s not the future, But the past that’ll get us.

There is more, but I’m tired.