@Tom ... Your Brexit conspiracies trigger me. The linking of Brexit's coming to fruition (17m people voting for it) to Putin, specifically. I used to have long debates with my dad about the EU, or EC ... as it was then. He was youngish in 75, and he he participated in the first EVER referendum, for the people, to decide the direction this country will take. He voted Yes, to enter. He would go into great length about all the pros and cons he was subjected to in the media, just like we were bombarded with in the second referendum. In his later years the biggest gripe he's had with the EU was that he feels they've 'taking over' the country. Literally ruling us from offshore. That we're being ruled by unelected foreigners - which is mostly true. And he'd not signed onto this plan. Especially as the majority of those EU politicians ruling the parliament are extreme liberal-minded morons. One of the most interesting slogans for the Yes campaign I found when I decided to review all my dad told me about the first referendum was this one ... "Better to lose a little national sovereignty than a son or daughter". The proposition we'll be safer, no more wars! This was brought up a lot during the EC/EU 75 referendum, apparently. My dad might have missed that beauty, he obviously didn't notice he'd signed onto relieving parliament of its duties to the people.
Well the truth is we might not have had wars with our neighbours. But the UK, the people, have been subjected to countless psychological wars, since. The IRA. Home-grown radicalized Islamic terrorists (because two pricks decided to lead our two nations into places we had no business being there). Mass immigration - firstly with Eastern Europeans coming into UK by the many thousands, very cheap labor, working class people, mid to low skilled. Running a lot of British trades people out of work. My own parents employed two Polish girls. They were hard workers and never complained or gave any hassle. The mass immigration never ends. Countless wars in the middle east have flooded Europe with real refugees, fact. But it's also attracted many millions of freeloading economic predators from around the world that are simply milking the system. Eroding our social welfare system many of you in the USA would probably benefit from. The housing in UK is completely at a standstill. But yet we accept more and more migrants. Free housing is issued to them, sometimes, as a priority over nationals that have been on housing lists for a few years. Not fair. Our capital is almost the crime capital on the planet. Knife crime, acid attacks, muggings, shootings, drug gangs, etc. This country feels like it's sliding into an abyss. If we continue to allow an offshore 'parliament' ran by alcoholic morons like Juncker. Be honest, can you believe this guy is the President of the European Commission? an unelected elitist - he supported the destruction of Libya - enabling many of the migrant crisis we see in the mediterranean. The son of a war-time nazi. He and many of the fellow EU parliamentarians sowed the destruction of the EU. the imperialist actions in Libya have opened the floodgates of African migrants to Europe. Hence the Italians - Salvini.
I work with a Polish chap, and we discussed Brexit ... he's making plans to live and work in Germany. He think's it will be too expensive for him to live here. He's lived in the UK for 14 years, he was one of the original Polish 700,000 to come in the early 2000's. So he's seen pretty much all the debates about how migration and immigrants have affected UK. Well he said to me that he's now got a lot of sympathy for UK people, he can respect our hostility towards the great changes that have visited our shores. Because he recently traveled back to Poland to visit the family. He couldn't believe the changes. 1.7 million Ukrainian refugees have been accepted by Poland (courtesy of you know who). My workmate told me there are the exact same tensions going on in Poland, now, Polish people are angry with the rate of changes to their neighborhoods. They are increasingly hostile to the 'newcomers'. Cheap labor, running down rates, pushing out the locals, crime, everything the Brits were lambasted for complaining about when it came to mass immigration, that we've been subjected to. His family back home in Poland have been affected by the change and he is fearful for what will happen there.
The simple truth is Europeans ... per se ... are each grumbling about the EU parliament's bumbling idiot leaders always getting it wrong. People are getting sick and tired of failings. And you, as an American, you wouldn't tolerate being run by a bunch of people you do not have the power to vote in or out. And you know it's true.
BTW, I was just 30 minutes from being in the heart of 7/7. I was due to be in Tavistock Square where 13 people were blown up. It was stressful enough being in London that day, with all the chaos going on. I lay the blame for this Islamic terror that quite often visits UK shores directly at the Blair government - Blair - a pro EU remainer - a war criminal. We're being subjected to a new IRA, in my eyes, a psychological war on the people of this country. And not for something the majority of us backed in the first place. And at this critical time in the UK, with all the chaos ... the EU simply cannot be ruling this nation at a time when OUR politicians MUST be accountable to the electorate.
Plus the massive lack of confidence pro-Brexit voters will have in democracy (17m) ...this country is going to be more effed up and headed towards great strife than maybe ever before without a total Brexit, deal or no deal.
Non-related section ensuessssssssssss.
Robert, I struggle to adequately (satisfy myself I am even able to) respond to you sharing so many
details I could read nowhere else, and I am a fairly regular BBC World channel viewer with one visit nearly forty years ago from Frankfurt to Italy and
back, by rental car. I've experienced long unions with female partners who are both children of continental European parents. I vacationed once in Mexico
and drove the roads and shopped and lodged in both small and more well known towns. More recently I resided a few years near mid Central Park in NYC.
Standing on a pier jutting into the Hudson river on 9/11 I looked south to view the brownish smoke streams rising from the former WTC site.
Earlier, when I watched news reports before the second airliner impact, it had already crossed my mind that the first plane must have flown by my upper
story location 3 or 4 blocks distant from its then 900 ft altitude. That day I got the unsettling awareness I was living in brand new wartime on what amounts
to a jumbo aircraft carrier in size, positioning, and as a strategic target.
I am concerned if I don't sequence what follows in synch with my appreciation for the new perspectives you have taken the time to shape, drawing your
POV out into text, externalizing what you live(ed) and internalizing as I and I imagine others do, for comfort's sake and "what good does it do to go on about it?".
The generations just before ours experienced two world wars just twenty years apart. The second one resulted in weapons capable of destroying nearly
all life on earth.
Pretending I did not type the sentence directly above, some personal observations of how I might be more or less moved by what you most strongly embrace,
reject, or take offense to. With my only prior foreign visits being to English and French Canada, several things struck me about the first small European
town I experienced. I was living in a 340 year old New England town founded and occupied for the initial 200 years by UK immigrants.
In Europe I saw a town center fountain of aged white stone and other architecture that seemed at least a thousand years old. Residents are descended from
an unimaginable number of generations living and dying in vicinity to that town center. My two in-laws were born ten miles apart in a semi rural precinct
in Europe. We were guests of my father-in-law in the house he grew up in, in his 2,000 year old small town. His 1920s grade school note and lesson books
were still in the basement but he mostly resided in the U.S. after age 18, some earlier schooling as an initial immigrant to the U.S.
I have lived in the same place in another part of the country since a few months after 9/11. The county population has nearly doubled to nearly a million
residents since I arrived and 2015 US census stats indicate that a startling 40 percent of the households of this formerly rural, whites farming their inheritances,
sort of place, do not speak english in the home as the first language. The whites do not mix well with the apartment and suburban tract home dwelling
newcomers in developments many of the same displeased white families who sold their inherited farms to the builders who overbuild and draw in even more
newcomers at reasonable prices the market inventory will bear. It is called building spec(ulative) housing. It booms or busts in bankrupcy.
This neighborhood has changed in a dozen years to the degree there have been changes on either side of our owned home, a young black family
from a northern manufacturing region and a young family of very recent Mexican immigrants.... both families are self-employed.
There has been a white migration to the more distant eastern part of the county. The most recent housing boom is serving up almost exclusively
new $400,000 plus priced homes and they are occuupied almost as construction is completed.
Our countries share the challenge of being perceived as at the top of the ladder in perceived opportunity, tolerance, and other positives that
drive quality of life. There is no need to describe our current political circumstances on national or state level. It is loud and dysfunctional, surely
visible from your side of the Atlantic.
My observations of two sets of European immigrant in-laws influences me to associate with your descriptions of changes and challenges.
I think Brexit vote result is aggravated somewhat by Putin's divide and conquer psy-ops but so much more by the forced experience pre-Brexit
similar to migrating from Europe to a seemingly permanent existence in a place like a growing U.S. community.
Migrants make a trade-off from the orienting (self and community) comfort living where those who came before them live and the hope for a better life for their children.
You're taking the losses and they are not salved by choices you've made trading for hope driven opportunity as actual immigrants I have known.
You are also giving up national political autonomy to politicians you regard as foreigners who are actuually incompetent.
Okay, gambling I have given you enough understanding of what influences on me produce the results you are reading, what are the lessons to
be learned from the devastation of the two WWs, the invention and deployment of weapons not capable of sane use due to their destructive
capacity, by two former empires of English speaking people in various degrees of decline, with two perenniel hostile threats in the form of Russia
and non-state sponsored terrorists? Do the UK and US need continental Europe, especially the former eastern bloc, excepting now unified Germany,
anywhere near as much as those countries need the UK and US? Have the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, and Australia made grave
enough mistakes since 1914 through today to influence you to assert any of their political systems have been or are competent enough to deserve or
justify continued autonomy, vs acting like fools who risk getting all of us killed. All of it is a trade off. Ideally we all should act in the spirit of people
steeped in ancestral heritage and ties. Give back the land everywhere to original owners documented through remaining land records or where impractical,
by legend or lore?
The world still reacts to the formation of present Israel, the dissolution of rule of the first cousins responsible for WWI and the effects of offensive
acts and the taking advantage of countries and peoples encountered and by "influenced" militarily superior societies. The technically superior societies
drive the rural from inherited land to urbanized communities.
I could argue for a path for world government of aligned ODCs if it wasn't for the history of the U.S. from 1620. Big has not been persuaively
better, but has it still been better than any other government Would a better arrangement be a united Europe aligned with a consolidate Australia,
Canada, Japan, Singapore, and U.S.? Vs. recent history, I'd like to think so.
The challenges posed to the UK by Scotland and the Irish Republic seem to argue for a do over Brexit question vote. The inability of the UK military to
keep one new aircraft carrier mission ready and properly escorted, and the national debts of both the US and UK do not indicate military spending
associated with emphasis on nationalism is the prudent way to steer towards. Maybe the experience of great-grandchildren of one set of immigrant
in-laws I earlier described being so far, half Chinese and half Korean is clouding my judgment.
You were able to put into words what comes from your gut as well as your heart and brain. I am sorry so much in this post is merely words.
