Brexit Day 6: A personal reaction

Always in

My tears started on the tube. I lowered my copy of War and Peace through which I’d been staring as if to find some meaningful message to explain the inexplicable, and miserably put my sunglasses on to shield the drops running down my face. When I looked up, a man opposite was watching me, not unkindly, but not smilingly either. My I’m In sticker was still on my arm, as visible and as ineffective as my tears. How had he voted? Did he feel victorious? Or as shaken as the five other people around us? It was only later that I reflected on how unusually quiet my commute had been on that fateful day; the day we voted for Brexit. The world had changed irreversibly, and nothing would be normal again.

Six days later, the tears are still coming. When I sit at my desk, constantly refreshing the live news feed to see who has resigned and what the world thinks of our insular, self-destructive, myopic decision. When I watch the evening news that I’ve already read and re-read that day and see a video of grown British men shouting sexual and racial abuse at a small Romanian girl in Lille. When I see that passersby have given flowers and cards of apology to the staff working in the Polish Social and Cultural Association which was smeared with racist graffiti. A social and cultural centre. When I think of my friends and colleagues who are funded by EU projects, or who work on EU visas, or simply live here in their adopted country because they chose to. They don't know what will happen, because nobody knows what will happen. The tears catch me by surprise, and at inconvenient moments.

The internet is overflowing with articles and pronouncements and statuses with angry, oversimplified, falsely dichotic statements; vile, supercilious attacks from both sides; and desperately confident predictions that Brexit will never happen, that Brexit may not yet happen, that Brexit can’t happen. Can it?

And I am simply tired, and sad, and tearful. My country is no longer the one I returned to after seven years abroad. I have spent just over half of my adult life living overseas in European countries. In these places I was made unquestionably and unthinkably welcome because that’s how fellow humans inherently are. I lived in France, where I studied the language and the culture. I lived in Ireland, where I worked on a clinical trials project funded by the European Research Council, which provided jobs to locals and people from inside and outside the EU. And where I watched as my adopted city slowly drowned in the bloated entrails of a gorged Celtic Tiger, and the people paid too high a price for withheld funding and austerity measures. Some of them paid with their own lives.

Two years ago I realised that I needed to move home, and into the heart of a thriving and multicultural city that would wash away my experience of austerity, insularism and stagnant political corruption. Now we are faced with similar threats. Amongst the racial hatred and spite I see little movements arising trying to combat this intolerance by displaying gestures or signs so that victims of hate will know that we are their friends and allies. Wear a safety pin to show that you are safe with me. Wear a safety pin on my clothes to show that I’m your friend. Wear a safety pin to show that I’m a human, because otherwise you may not know. When did the very essence of kindness and humanity have to be physically displayed to be presumed?

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