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People are stockpiling for Brexit, while my youngest and I are frightened by the climate emergency. We have to remember: fear is fuel for tyranny
I am not stockpiling for Brexit – that seems wildly melodramatic. Instead, I find myself waking up in the night, wondering whether to arm myself. By dawn, of course, this seems a little extreme, too. Somehow, by breakfast, I have reminded myself I am not in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, feasting on a foetus, and that in fact I live near a well-stocked Tesco Metro.
Yet, if Brexit is a vast psychodrama that is never about what it says it is about (no one is that emotionally invested in tariffs, whatever they suggest), then it is bound to provoke some deeply peculiar feelings. Some of my friends have become very anxious – about food supplies, medicines, civil unrest. We had some of this before 2016: food banks and riots, anyone? But the media ramps up these feelings by the hour. The message is that democracy has toppled and everything will close down on 1 November; in truth, this is the day negotiations will start for real. Continue reading...