The Brexit…Exit Common Sense - Editorial, The Week in Review – Analysis, Commentary, Opinion

06.25.2016

The Brexit…Exit Common Sense

We are in a place that our culture has not occupied in my lifetime. By our culture I mean, our American-Western-European culture.

We are in a place of nonsense, of anti-intellectualism, of abject denial, of absurdity.

We are in a place where the average person knows nothing about their government, economics, science, and they imagine themselves as being wiser than people who have studies these things their entire life. 

    

      The masses are shouting that the earth is flat, and the universe less than 10,000 years old.

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      There are no such things as greenhouse gasses-global warming is a myth.   

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     Nicotine does not cause cancer – go ahead and vape.

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     Walt Disney faked the moon landing.

          My religion is better than yours (even though no-one can ever know the truth).

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     My book is more authentic (even though it is all mythology).

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     My Christian witness more faithful (because I hate in the name of Jesus).

This week the people of The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union because they had been fed a lie about how their membership in that international organization was holding them back. 

The majority of those voting to leave were old, poor, uneducated, rural voters who were being told that their future prosperity, their retirement security, their access to health care depended on their “going it alone.”

The following day global markets plunged, the English pound fell to a fifty year low. The people that were lying to them about how much money would be freed to flow into the health care system, came on T.V. and admitted that those claims were false.

Millions of those who voted to exit the E.U., for Britain to leave, to “brexit”- broke it, finding themselves bereft of common sense – they want their vote back, but there is no redo.

Their Prime Minister; David Cameron called for the referendum as a gamble. He never wanted to leave the E.U., he called for the vote because he thought he would win, and thereby silence the critics of globalization and modernity.

He lost and now he has resigned.

Millions of young, college educated, urban voters have been left out in the cold. They are facing another decade of recession, they are no longer free to travel, to work, to go to school, to develop new relationships, to find spouses, to raise families anywhere in Europe. They are holed up on their island; in despair.

Now Scotland wants to leave the U.K., and Northern Ireland, and France is talking about “frexit,” the Netherlands are talking about “nexit,” generations of work to make Europe a safe and inclusive place, to set aside war and conflict in favor of open borders, and free trade. That work is gone, set aside, undone.

There in Europe, and here in America, those masses of people our speaking from a place of fear, and imagined insecurity. They are afraid of immigrants, they are afraid of education, they want guns to protect themselves from the “other”, and to win the lottery. When they have more to fear from the gun in their own home, and their possibility of being struck by lightning is greater than the chance that they will pull the Powerball.

Wake up America…

Wake up and vote…