I’m still recovering from the UK’s EU referendum count yesterday. I’d tuned into Twitter after work and found the Britain Elects feed tallying up the counted votes as they came in.
Sign times have changed: The tally is in a view-only Google Sheets file.
Most counties hadn’t submitted results by midnight Eastern Time, so I went to bed.
I woke up and the news hadn’t improved at all:
I worried for my siblings, who own property or have been steadily building up their financial stability. I fretted for friends who own businesses based on imports and therefore trade goods and exchange currency. I wondered about still other friends and loved ones, some native-born Brits and others recently immigrated, who’ve had to hear ugly, suspicious, and fact-light rhetoric about the integrity of the UK’s borders and resources for the past year.
More, I remembered the oppressive economic and political news for my family and families like ours when the Conservative Party was last in power, in the 1970s and 1980s. We suffered a great deal from Thatcher-era policies, and it pained me to think that we’ll suffer yet again because of the party’s austerity policies, its role in bringing the referendum campaign to the public in the first place, and the consequences of the choices that 51.87% of respondents have made in the last 24 hours.
Nightmares aren’t dreams out to get us. They’re signs that our consciousness wants to clear out trauma, and they recur when we ignore them.
Nearly 52% of the UK’s engaged voters have ignored the traumas of domestic austerity and the costs it presses on vulnerable people. Nearly 52% have forgotten just what we all went through the last time we worked through these questions, and that 52% includes people who voted “Leave,” in their own words, “just to see what would happen.”
The markets today should’ve given them an eyeful. Losses in one day totalled two trillion dollars.
So the voting is over and I, for one, am prepared to wail about the results over the entire weekend.
But here’s the opportunity: to pay attention to this nightmare rather than look away and dodge the messages it holds for us, to consider the trends behind the results, the quality of the arguments and data, the patterns of these arguments repeating elsewhere around the world, the consequences those arguments are having for us and for others.
We can’t afford to ignore our nightmares. Otherwise we’ll have them again and again… including this November on the left side of the Atlantic.