Brexit

[sabotabby]

Woke up to the news, still kind of reeling.

To my British friends: My condolences. I'm sorry that so many of your fellow citizens voted with the fascists and gave into terrorism.

At least the Pigfucker's gone, though I guess he was going to go anyway and it's a countdown to Führer Farange or Boris as PM now. Just, damn.

Comments

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Duffy and I are not very pleased about it. I think a lot of people took the opportunity to give London and the South-East a kick in the teeth, without thinking about the wider issues. Or maybe Britain does indeed hate furriners to an enormous extent, I wouldn't be surprised.

I'm worried a lot about possible changes to human rights, labour laws, and environment laws, but the whole fascism thing is obviously a major concern too. When I was growing up there was always an old-timer or two who could be called upon to visit the kids in schools and show them his or her concentration camp tattoo (our high school once arranged for a double act of two epically morose Jews to come and shove their forearms in each of our faces individually), but I don't really know what's going to happen when the last camp survivors are dead and there is no-one to provide a direct link with the consequences of European fascism. Maybe some kind of amazing augmented reality experience.

[sabotabby]

I think that's such a big generational difference. When I was growing up, we semi-regularly met with actual Holocaust survivors that would talk about their experiences. While many of my students (particularly the Tamil ones at my last school, or the First Nations students at my current school, or one of my students who came to Canada to escape a civil war in his country) have more direct experience with genocide than that, for kids born in Canada to white families, it's much more distant than it was to us.

Then again, the young in the UK overwhelmingly voted Remain, so they at least have a sense of the present if not the past. It sounds like it was the Boomers that were the problem.

Anyway, my main concern is also human rights, labour, and the environment, and secondarily the effect that an economic crash will have on all of those things. It's fertile ground for fascism; they are all quite linked.