On a recent summer evening on St. Simons Island, some dear English friends were explaining their growing sentiment to vote for leaving the European Union.
They have a house on the island and consider America their second home. I had grown uneasy about the consequences for Britain should its voters decide to leave. I was speaking from the head; they were responding from the heart.
Britain means much to me and my family. London was the first place I traveled away from the United States. My wife and I honeymooned across England. We lived there a few years, and both my kids attended English public schools. My goddaughter just married an English guy and headed there to make a life.
It has been 15 years since we lived in England, but the subtle tensions and worries over European influence were present even then. I marveled at a story that briefly swept through British media about a baker who was busted for using scales that continued to weigh in ounces and pounds instead of grams and kilos. This resonated broadly and elicited much harrumphing about those uppity Europeans.
The British – in particular the English – long have had issues with the folks across the channel, I guess dating back to when the Romans first attempted their European union. At times the island folk seem more at odds with the folks who live 20 miles across from Dover than they are with the folks across the 3,500-mile pond.
Winston Churchill (how can he not be quoted?) wrote something in the 1930s that gets at this. “…We have our own dream and our own task,” he wrote in an article for an American magazine. “We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed.”
That said, after being diverted by a world war and its nasty aftermath, Churchill warmed to the idea of knitting Britain and “the continent” closer together.
I also recall the odd pride in England over its retaining the pound as the francs, liras, marks and pesetas were retired in favor of the euro. I remember talking to folks in a village outside London who had been to Disney World, but for whom the idea of setting foot on the continent was simply unthinkable.
To be sure, I encountered just as many Britons who were at peace with a European identity – treating Spain as their Florida and France as their weekend retreat. They tended to be in urban London, which, predictably enough, voted against Brexit.
Yet, as an American, I was surprised by how unsettled the idea of national identity seemed across Britain. The kingdom is much less united than it had appeared from afar: It seemed much more a collection of countries – England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland (even Cornwall) than I was prepared to expect.
The Brexit vote broke along these lines – cosmopolitan London joined Scotland and Northern Ireland to stay with Europe. The English outside of London largely voted to leave.
In countryside England, anger has been mounting for some time. Many English folks had lost patience with the complaints from Scotland in particular about wanting to leave the United Kingdom. At the same time they fumed as they sensed that Europeans were slowly encroaching on their sovereign rights, the vision of French-speaking bureaucrats issuing random annoying regulations and tut-tutting over British – really English — traditions.
“Would Americans accept,” my friends asked the other day, “the idea of some bureaucrats from another country telling them how to live their lives?”
Well, no.
That’s why Americans are all taking the day off on Monday. Precisely 240 years ago, America’s leaders decided – without benefit of a referendum – to exit Britain.
In Britain, proponents of leaving Europe argued the same thing. Leaving the EU would free them from, to borrow from Thomas Jefferson, “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny. …”
However, in Brexit 2016, the usurpating and injuring was mild by comparison. European troops technically weren’t marching on London. No one had abolished Parliament or sent the queen heading to the hills for safety. There wasn’t even much taxation without representation.
In fact, a week after the vote, the evils inflicted by the EU seem a faint, almost comforting, memory compared to what Brexit has wrought.
Even so, it is hard to have lived among the British and not believe that this shall pass. An Englishman named George Harrison once wrote that “All Things Must Pass.”
In 2005, I returned to London to cover the terrorist strike on the Underground. The place was calm, and they were indeed carrying on. I talked to Lucy Bailey, an 83-year-old pensioner who was riding the Tube a few days after the bombing. She was serene.
She recalled 1940, when German planes rained incendiary bombs on the city. “I think about that every time I board the Underground,” she told me, serenely, almost sweetly. “Mr. Churchill said we would have business as usual in London, business as usual,” she said. “It was a way of fighting back, wasn’t it?”
Certainly. And the people who survived the Blitz will survive this as well.
Even so, I also think about a video I posted to my Facebook page the other day. It was a scene from “Seinfeld.” A British flag was superimposed on George Costanza’s shirt, while Jerry wore an American flag.
Jerry: “I think you could just go back …. Pretend like it never happened.”
George: “I could go back, pretend it never happened. I was blowing off a little steam, so what?
Jerry: “So what?”
George: “Never Happened!”
Jerry: “Never happened.”
I await the “likes” from across the pond.
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