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.