Monday 27 June 2016

backstabbers

Copyright: <a href='http://www.123rf.com/profile_jegas'>jegas / 123RF Stock Photo</a>


72 hours have passed since THAT result.  4 days since I cast my opinion. My feeds and timeline are full of people saying we should calm down. A clear head has me thinking that we just have to skip to the fifth and final stage of recovery; acceptance. The morning has not awoken to find us literally adrift heading to get a better view of the Northern Lights.

And then. 

I'm walking around my local supermarket and someone holds my gaze as we do the shoppers shuffle past the sliced loaves and I find myself thinking what what did you vote? I spot one of those glances from one person to the hijab-ed lady in the milk aisle and I am reminded of the twitter stories of immigrant (I'll come back to this in a mo) people being venomously told they need to book their flights home and journalists faced with the gleeful spewing of the man in the street who is glad that there won't be any immigrants allowed in anymore and his wife who is proud of her country intimating that this means no other should share in it with her. 

And then we hear of the leave voters who have resurfaced with the groggy head of the night's revelry now discover the handsome promises they cuddled up to turns out to have cut and run in the middle of the night, leaving them dazed, confused and pale with the shame of being used.  

Is this what we must expect from now on?

Has the belly of this country been sliced to allow the festering maggots, that have been feeding quietly on themselves, to slither to the surface and infect the wounds that many of us are desperate to nurse and heal?

It could be just my paranoia. But I come from the land of the 1980s where my innocent stroll to school could be littered with racist taunts and people would openly boycott the corner shop because the new owners were Pakistanis (yes this happened and there was much rejoicing when they left). So my ears, eyes and sensitivities are on high alert when I hear that the country that I was born and raised in, educated me, nursed me, enjoyed the working benefits of me, my grandparents and parents, thrust me into the path of an Englishman, saw the birth of my children; that this country doesn't want people like me.

Because I am the child of migrants. I have taught the children of migrants who like me know nothing of their parent's country so this country is their home - this is all we know. The metamorphosis of one generation's culture, language, life in one nation to another experienced by their children has happened in Britain for centuries.

Do people really expect that to change? Overnight? (By the way I am well aware of the plethora of other reasons people voted leave, I'm choosing to focus on this one as it has arisen in my real life timeline.)

Is this the ugliness that we have to raise our kids with now (on top of all the ugliness of scary millennial living that's already out there)?

And anyway, you tell me, how do you spot an immigrant? 

Having already been in denial that this really, really happened and that one day my kid's kids will be studying this week in their history lessons, I am retreating to step two and four : anger and depression.  

Allow it.