Someone Else's Seeming

[smokingboot]

If we don't get Nigel Farage as our next prime minister, it won't be down to lack of effort from the press.

The guy is a con artist, always has been. But like many con artists, his message is very simple and promises easy solutions to complex problems. He's being helped now by these well funded and well co-ordinated marches. They aren't necessarily big, but they are all happening around the same time giving the impression of vast support and overwhelming national unrest. But how real that support/unrest is remains anybody's guess. An IPSOS poll last year found that only 4% of citizens considered immigration an important personal issue, while higher percentages considered it a national problem. This year, those latter percentages are much higher, but I'm not finding much about percentages of 'personal impact.' So if the problem is not personal, what are people finding to fret about, and where are they finding it?

It reminds me of an old friend's anecdote. She walked into a supermarket and noted two Eastern European women talking together, and it made her feel left out. She couldn't understand them. 'I would like to have been part of that conversation,' she said, 'you know, join in. But I couldn't! Because they were speaking another language!'

This story puzzled me for a number of reasons but mostly for the fact that she was a very shy woman, still is. I couldn't get her to join in with friends she knew and liked, let alone strangers. This woman was never, in all her life, going to walk up to people she didn't know in a supermarket and start a conversation, not in English, not in any other language.

But that was it, that was the narrative. A friend convinced herself that she was prohibited from doing something she would never attempt, by conditions that may not have existed. She is a good person who comes from, let's call it a too familiar kind of background (parents who, pre the baptism of their first grandchild, made it clear that 'Jewish names' would not please them) so taking into account the challenges she faced, maybe her anxiety can be understood. But still.

Are there many people wandering around with these half stories about how some other might have something they wanted and didn't get, a friend, a conversation, a job/car/house? Is it just about the observation of someone else's seeming?

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

You're on to something here. Feeling "left out" is a deep, primordial playground fear that's easily activated in adulthood.

[smokingboot]

I get it, but at the same time, I don't.

Yes, the feeling is easily triggered, and it is a primal fear, perhaps, of not belonging. But re adult perception, I guess I'm astonished that feeling collides the real and apparently wins!

[mallorys_camera]

Feeling always wins.

Which is why early childhood education is so important.

[flemmings]

My father, born in 1913, complained back in the 80s that he could no longer understand conversations he heard in passing because they weren't in English. I thought that was batshit 40 years ago, but hell, he was Of That Time. I'm appalled it's still ongoing.

[smokingboot]

The story of your father is interesting, thank you for sharing it. It ties into the sense of a fever dream around these issues. I remember when it was women in the work place, then the Irish, then the Blacks, then Asians, then Ugandan Asians, then Muslims, then East Europeans and now it's 'illegal immigrants'. And I am told by some that this time it is different because ...

But if it's different, how come it always feels exactly the same?