If you see something say something.
On Thursday voters in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland will stand in the voting booth and decide whether or not to pull the trigger and leave the European Union. Polls say they just might do it. Then the bottom will fall out of the financial markets, and the world will spiral down the drainpipe into its second giant recession in less than a decade. Then like falling dominoes we could get Trump in the White House because he feeds like a succubus on that sort of fear and despair. Wanna-be fascist Marine Le Pen could ride the same dark wave in France. Same with the far right Freedom Party that nearly won the last election in Austria. The whole European Project that’s kept that bloody continent away from one another’s throats since 1945 couild start to crumble. We end up cowering in our basements while our children die in the next big round of wars.
“If you see something, say something,” warn the signs in our airports and train stations. I’m seeing something, and it’s more frightening than some mysterious unattended satchel in a train station.
The disaster scenario may not play out in the exact sequence a lot of experts are describing. Maybe it doesn’t blow up all at once. We get a slow grind down like when the economy started to unravel in the fall of 2007. Remember how that felt? It reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s famous suggestion that the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.
Maybe the whole Brexit thing will blow over. Just when you think it couldn’t get any more insane comes the news that Jo Cox, a mother of two and one of the most promising young politicians in the UK, was shot by a neo-Nazi nutball as she stepped out of a local library in the north of England. Maybe that tragedy works like a bucket of ice water to finally sober up British voters, and the rest of us get to dodge the bullet. But there are a whole lot of other bullets out there. The Brexit vote is just the next-up opportunity to do something momentously dumb in a year that seems filled with them.
Sigmund Freud once wrote, “The aim of all life is death.” He believed that each of us has a death instinct, an unexplainable urge to aim ourselves down the path of our own undoing. Maybe the same theory applies to hummanity as a whole. There’s something baked into society that causes it to periodically act like a crazy man standing on a ledge. The rest of us are stuck playing the helpless crowd in the street, hoping against hope for a step back from the abyss. Does it do any good to shout “Don’t jump!”
Maybe I’m being overly alarmist here, and there’s no powder keg connected to all these fuses we keep lighting. That’d be great. I’ll be send out a Tweet saying, “Congrats to me for being wrong about the Armageddon thing.” But I was just traveling in the United Kingdom, where it’s hard to find a park without a stone chiseled chockfull with the names of people who died in the great wars of the last century. Read a history of the months leading up to World War I. The small thinking and xenophobia that blew up in the faces of politicians then sound a lot like what what you see playing across the screen 24 hours a day on CNN.
Stupid and hate are in the ascendency right now. People are afraid of all the wrong things. If you’re paying any attention you see it everywhere. Maybe you thought the situation would have some sort of self-correcting mechanism, because the alternative doesn’t make any sense. But not making any sense has just become another part of the political calculation.
The only answer is to say something. Speak, yell, sing, whisper, post, share. I’m not saying you need to be the A-hole polluting the social media with strident political rhetoric. Be the thoughtful voice on the other side of that conversation.
Just don’t be in the crowd of dumbstruck bystanders any more. That’s how stupid and hate win.
