Shame

I was prepared to feel shame and embarrassment with my country around this time of the year.  I thought it would be just from our football team.  Instead, it is something entirely different and entirely bigger – a vote to leave the EU.  Am I shocked?  No.  Am I disappointed?  Extremely.  I think this is nothing short of a disaster – we’ve already seen a calamitous drop in the value of the pound (personally, a mixed blessing – very good for when I visit the UK and spend my US dollars, very bad because I still have significant savings in the UK).  When I last exchanged a chunk of my savings from pounds into dollars, the exchange rate was 2 dollars to 1 pound.  Now it is about 1.35 dollars to 1 pound.  That is a shocking decrease.  I think this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the economic impact of this vote - I fear for the future of our country, and I expect to see Britain plunge into a recession now.  I saw a headline saying that the young have been screwed by the older generation – who are the ones who voted in numbers.  I couldn’t agree more.   

I want to share a Financial Times reader comment that I think is doing the rounds on the internet and eloquently sums up the feelings of many:

“A quick note on the first three tragedies. Firstly, it was the working classes who voted for us to leave because they were economically disregarded, and it is they who will suffer the most in the short term. They have merely swapped one distant and unreachable elite for another. Secondly, the younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors. Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel. When Michael Gove said, ‘The British people are sick of experts,’ he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has led to anything other than bigotry?”