Bregression

There's a swear word that Brits use which when uttered in North America can carry the collective weight of a thousand F-bombs. I almost never use this word because of its weight but my Scottish boyfriend most certainly uses it. And, by golly, have I been hearing it a lot this morning.

51.9% of Brits voted to leave the EU last night after a referendum was held to determine the UK's future in the European Union. As a member of the commonwealth living in England, I was allowed to fill in a ballot (my second time now after London's municipal elections). I voted to remain. So it goes.

I'm not a very political person, although I do enjoy a good debate now and then (Bob can attest to that!). Watching the televised debate between the Remain camp and the so called Brexit (Ugh) was very informative. I didn't retain all the info about the economy or immigration after the fact, but I was given the chance to observe the characters of those on either side.

 To be honest, all I hear when Boris Johnson talks is (insert your ponciest RP here) "Bleh bleh bleh self-important nonsense Cambridge bleh bleh but I don't comb my hair so I'm one of the common people". It is so painfully obviously that this guy is out for self-aggrandisement, given that he was against leaving only last year. But once David Cameron announced he was for Remain, opportunity struck! "By George, I could be PM!", thought the weasel. Most of what he and Gisela Stuart had to talk about was how bad immigration was and how much money leaving the EU was apparently going to save us.

Ruth Davidson, the MP who was speaking for Remain, as well as the other woman (can't remember her name but she was brilliant), spoke frequently of the impact to the younger generation. What are we teaching them by being so self-important and so separatist? What kind of people are we forcing them to turn into? They spoke about culture, they spoke about unity--basically, they spoke about evolution.

Evolution is what has made us who were are today. It is responsible for the fact that we are now distant cousins to primates, and not their sisters and brothers. Since our homo-erectus days we have been doing lots of cool stuff like, inventing wheels that would be used to make into carts, that would turn into chariots, that would turn into carriages, that would turn into automobiles. We've also been using sounds we make with our lips and tongues strung together in specific orders to demote objects, feelings, commands. We call it language. The Earth currently has 6500 of them.

Now, if you want to see real examples of evolution, look at this thing we started making way back which is called "art". Art is the most radically-evolving part of our human world. I'll use the example of classical music, since that's my field.

Listen:
Bach was THE Baroque music dude and he died in 1750. For you non-musical types, it's the harpsichord sounding stuff you often hear in period films. Mozart was born in 1756 and he begins the classical era, which is picked up by Beethoven. They both took Bach's and Handel's beautifully composed (albeit too structured for me) symphonies and concertos and oratorios and ran with it. Bridging the gap between classical and romantic were guys like Schubert (1797-1828) who took the structures of classical started breaking them up, allowing them to breathe and find themselves. By Brahms in the mid 1800s we are having a candle-lit dinner by the sea followed by a stroll along the beach hand-in-hand as the tide comes in. Then comes the emotional rollercoaster of flat out musical painting, self-expression, SO MANY FEELINGS. Mahler and Wagner are in the house. Mahler died 105 years ago. With the invention of recorded music we have been able to pay more attention to the evolution of music. The fact that we can tell the difference between something that was written in 1965 and something that was written in 1975 tells you a lot about how much human beings love to explore. And this is just music. Art is everywhere.

But it ain't in our government.

So, while this is all fascinating shit, it doesn't give you a very great idea of where the human race is at in terms of enlightenment. Sure we can send messages to each other via objects in the sky, but the hunger for money and power apparently still wins the day. We do not listen to each other; we listen to our own kind--to people with the same ideas, the same backgrounds and the same values as we do. We do not love each other; we love ourselves. We do not give; we only receive. Until we start listening and giving and loving, we will make only war and never peace.

Perhaps in the last hundred years we've progressed in leaps and bounds in some ways, but why are we at the point now where we've had enough evolution. "It's time now to regress!" says Brexit. "It's time now that we think only about ourselves and not others"; "It's time now that we put up walls instead of bridges"; "It's time to think about the present, not the future." I'd say that we're regressing to a primitive state except that the fucking primates were curious enough to EVOLVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. So congratulations you  Brexit cunts, you are now officially less evolved than monkeys.

P.S. I was on the tube thinking about how we all commute. Nowadays we sit scrolling through facebook on our devices. We don't speak to each other. Why not? How come we don't want to meet new people? I feel like if it were mandatory to speak to each other on the tube, rather than having the social pressure of keeping quiet in public places beating us down with the force of a freaking sledgehammer, I think that we would be better people. I think we would listen to each other and I think we would evolve. But what do I know? I'm just a smug Canadian.