Nothing To Envy
Writing in the local paper. Local Issues with a global take. I never translate literally and the editor trims at will to make it fit. Here’s my version, then theirs, which can now be seen online as well.
Today is the day or maybe
today was the day or maybe it has changed again since I wrote this and it is
the day again. Whatever the case, it was supposed to be today. The day that the
United Kingdom divorced itself from the European Union in a misguided and misled
attempt to become great again. I was
born in the Canada and the moment I open my mouth, you can tell I was also
raised there but through a strange series of circumstances involving the
Ukraine, Stalin, Word War Two, a walk through Trafalgar Square, I also hold a
British passport and am registered here in Spain as a UK citizen. I applied for
that EU passport more than twenty years ago while I was living in the United
States, attracted by the freedom of movement idea so central to the European
project. Borderless work and travel seemed the future to me and I wanted to be
part of it. Years passed and I grew to feel part of Spain and Europe but then
another cataclysmic series of events happened.
A bank named after some brothers crashed and soon the world’s economy soon
sank with it. The causes of the crisis can be endlessly debated but one of the resulting
consequences that can’t be denied is the dark return of tribal nationalism.
From Washington to Warsaw, to Budapest, Barcelona and El Ejido, angry yet
powerless citizens, impotent against such global economic powers, have started
to look to the past, yearning for an imagined idyll when everything was
supposedly better, somehow greater. Even though their democracy is one of the
most consolidated in the world, the British were not immune to this dark return
and voted to end the freedom that had initially attracted me to Europe. The utter
chaos we see in Westminster proves that, faults and all, Spain’s democracy has
nothing to envy the British but it also serves as a stark warning. In today’s
hyperspeed world with its modern problems, new and dynamic solutions need to be
sourced and while there is nothing wrong with being proud of your country or
its past, solutions to today’s problems won’t be found in Stonehenge, among the
halls of El Escorial or the gigantic cross on the hill.
