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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

UK

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Recurring nightmares

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:

A blue and red bar indicate that 48.13% (16,154,489 votes) of the referendum votes were cast for "Remain"; and 51.87% (17,408,330 votes) were cast for "Leave."
Image: From Britain Elects’ vote count spreadsheet.

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.

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A Writing November

Cartoon of open newspaper with "Correction" advertisement: "The Downing St memo seems to be at odds with pretty much anything you remember seeing and hearing in the media in the runup to the Iraq war. Your memory is in error. We regret your mistake."
(c) Tom Toles (2005) | “The First Draft of the Rewrite of History”

I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo 2013), and will be using the 50,000 word-challenge to reboot my research on the British executive branch’s structure, values, personnel, and communications during the 18 months before the UK- and US invaded Iraq.*

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the March 2003 invasion and the 8th year since I began to study how the Blair administration rendered Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “non-compliant” with international protocols on weapons of mass destruction and an “imminent” threat to the UK national interest.

I’ve already written and presented about this case for other communication academics (Popular Culture Association, 2008; Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2009), and I’ve also written a 150-page doctoral study about it with a bibliography nearly 25 pages long. I may write for these readers again in the future, but not next month.

November is about writing about the British executive branch, weapons of mass destruction, secrecy, freedom of information, and civil servants, not for other academics and not as part of a degree program, but for members of the public: people like you who are savvy and curious, who don’t necessarily know a lot about the details of this case, and who care about good governance and want to read high-quality, engaging content about it.

I’m not going to write and revise next  month, though; I’m just going to write. By the end of the month, I’ll know whether I have it in me to turn this year-old baby into a book in 2014.

My goals for November are simple enough, and I’m declaring them here to increase the risk:

  1. Write ~2,000 words six days each week for 30 days, or a minimum of 1,670 words daily.
  2. Focus on generating these 50,000-50,100 words, rather than fretting about whether they are good words.
  3. Remember how much I love this project and wonder why it’s taken me so long post-graduation to return to it.

If you’d like to track my progress through November, there’ll be a word count widget in the right column of my homepage. And if you have a fiction or non-fiction book in you too, then you still have a day to sign up! As of tonight, nearly 190,000 other writers are waiting for you.

Expect an update on this from me in a few weeks.

* This intention marks me as a NaNo Rebel. Good luck to all the novelists too!