How many things is it possible to be scared of at the same time? I am asking for a friend. Actually for all my friends. Indeed, everyone I ever met. Every day a new horror arises. Sunbathing in February? Well, that’s not normal is it? Police tape up again. Another stabbing. Another young woman missing. Then various Apocalypse Now-style scenarios played out on Twitter by the minute. Donald Trump excusing more murder and torture. People I admire dying way too young. Bodies in sleeping bags on the street. Camps in China. Kashmir. People shooting at the face of Shamima Begum for fun, and on and on it goes.
I used to watch a lot of horror films. Then I stopped and I don’t really know why; or perhaps I do. I used to think in a mindless way that some sort of technology would come along and solve everything, and now I feel I don’t know anything, despite the endless flow of information that technology enables.
Pessimism, however, is not an option. It drifts soon enough into passivity. It is draining and selfish in a certain way. I am not talking about clinical depression here; I am referring to the lazy way in which people my age go round talking in front of their kids about how things are going so badly wrong that there is little point. I’ve done it. It’s a habit that needs to be broken.
My generation does it unthinkingly. We say it and we write it and then what happens? The kids – some of them – have turned round and demanded action on climate change and hardly anyone turned up to debate it in the House of Commons. Why? Because Brexit is bigger? Spare me.
I read repeatedly that old people voted for Brexit and that if there is a second referendum the young will reverse the decision. Is this really so? I can’t see it getting to a vote, but what do I know? Also I don’t see Brexit animating the youth I come into contact with. It’s just another thing older people did to screw up their lives. Other things matter much more to them, and guess what – maybe they are right. They want somewhere to live that is affordable. They want jobs in which they are not treated appallingly. They want to be able to breathe. Some of them are very much of the “get it over with” attitude. The things we tell them they might lose have already been taken away.
It’s hard not to see Brexit as a product of a profound midlife crisis that has caused a middle-aged nervous breakdown. And the middle-aged should recognise this feeling, as we have been here before.
The truth is, ’twas bliss to be alive some of the time in the 1970s. Some of the time it was not: mass unemployment, rubbish in the streets, the pound dropping, racist riots. We saw the future and we said no, we want no part of this. The Ruts sang “Babylon’s burning/With anxiety”, but the collective disgust channelled by punk soon became atomised, giving way to music about individual despair.
But Babylon is here and now and conjured everywhere in Project Fear, or just the everyday news. Lorries in Dover. Drug shortages. The UK and the EU locked into a pact of mutually assured destruction. No wonder the no-deal fanatics, those public school nihilists, want to burn it all down. It makes as much sense as everything else. They are like toddlers who smash up their own Lego creations because you have told them they have to share. It’s a feeling I understand because I remain in touch with my own inner child.
Yet these people are vampiric, feeding on the fear. We can’t show all our cards while we play poker they say, while flashing them at every available opportunity. The ludicrous Farage march: an insult, a joke, an incitement to riot – who really knows? Does it actually matter?
Small-time, small-minded politicians and a sycophantic press have made Brexit the issue of the day. Every day. What if it isn’t?
I know it’s heretical to suggest that here, but maybe I’ve felt the fear and said it anyway. Some sort of deal will happen, I imagine, at some stage but the political class has been shown to fail, to fail absolutely. That is what is more significant and still not understood. The results of that failure set the preconditions of fascism: we know that. We have always known it. But it has also set the preconditions for something new. We have failed (I include myself in this failure), arguing day in and day out about trade deals, EU bureaucracy, the generalised unnameable loss that Brexit will entail, the erosion of mobility. Thus we help build up anxieties in our children, then we blame the internet for their poor mental health.
But listen to them. “We are the voiceless future of humanity … We will not accept a life in fear and devastation. We have the right to live our dreams and hopes,” they write as they organise more international protests about climate change.
I note that every remainer from here to kingdom come quotes John Lydon’s genius line “There is no future in England’s dreaming”.
But they don’t follow it up with the next lines – “Don’t be told what you want/Don’t be told what you need” – perhaps because they are too busy telling everyone exactly that.
I may be scared of many things. But people thinking for themselves and deciding what’s important – that soothes my fear. A little.
• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist
