Ours is not to reason why, indeed

[selenak]

Apropos the day, the days. The jumping of the cliff (of Dover). I don't have anything smart and/or consoling in me. Hence, links to more eloquent people.

Requiem for a dream

On loathing Rees-Moog


John Le Carré: It's breaking my heart, a speech held when receiving the Olaf-Palme-Award, in which he says:

I’m not just a remainer. I’m a European through and through, and the rats have taken over the ship, (...) We Brits are all nationalists now. Or so Johnson would have us believe. But to be a nationalist you need enemies and the shabbiest trick in the Brexiteers’ box was to make an enemy of Europe. “Take back control!” they cried, with the unspoken subtext: and hand it to Donald Trump, along with our foreign policy, our economic policy, our health service and, if they can get away with it, our BBC.

And lastly, because there's always music German-Russian pianist Igor Levit's encore at that most British of events, the First Night of the Proms 2017: Beethoven (born in Bonn, died in Vienna), in a version arranged by Hungarian Franz Liszt:

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[sovay]

John Le Carré: It's breaking my heart, a speech held when receiving the Olaf-Palme-Award

Thank you; I hadn't yet seen that.

[selenak]

You're welcome. His writings in recent years on this topic, both non-fiction and fictional, are always lucid and poignant, I find.

[kore]

It is heartbreaking.

[selenak]

I keep coming back to the "watching a friend committ suicide by drugs" analogy. Only it's more like a hostage taker who doesn't just drug themselves but several other family members who never agreed to it.

[moon_custafer]

It feels as though a slight majority of the country has decided to go live in the dystopian AU of the Doctor Who ep ‘Turn Left,’ w/o even the excuse of a nuclear explosion, and have taken the rest of the country with them. And they’re grinning and cheering about it.

[selenak]

*hugs*

[ffutures]

Thanks - it's one of those things that is so overwhelming that it's pretty difficult to talk about it without feeling something like existential dread. Considering I was 20 when Britain joined and I'm just coming up on 67 it's been a hell of a long time, and it's going to take a lot of adjusting.

The worst part is that it will be years to decades before the full effects are known, and in the meantime people will forget a lot of what the EU did for them, and how much they've lost.

[selenak]

I'm 50 now, so when I first visited Britain as a teenager, it was already a member. The only comparable shift I've experienced was the (as it turned out, temporary) end of the Cold War and the fall of the wall, but that was the opposite experience - a coming together, not a building of walls and borders. It's a nightmare.