Photo above: Carnaby Street welcomes the World to London in 2012 (Photo by @massimousai)
Article write By Massimo Usai – (London 17.05.2021)
THE STARTING POINT
Where does all this disappointment and pain that I have to endure these days come from?
From the extended closure of the last 16 months for the pandemic?
Since my Arsenal are having the worst season in 30 years?
Maybe I noticed my summer shirts are definitely tight, and I need to act fast?
I don’t think that they’re the cause. I need to start exactly from a specific year, a leap year, 2012.
In 2012 I thought I was experiencing the beginning of a more than exciting phase for my life and the country I was in, Britain.
Our spirit in general was skyrocketing.
I don’t just mean mine, but we were all happy and friendly with each other.
With everyone! From the neighbour to one of the many tourists (do you remember that once we had “tourists” around?) who populated the city at the time.
The tourists were invited to family homes to use their empty rooms to help host so many people coming, as well as generating some additional income.
2012: OLYMPIC GAMES
The weather was great. We seemed to be experiencing an endless spring, which began on the night of December 31st.
The fireworks that greeted the arrival of the New Year had been spectacular, exciting and brought down a few tears of emotion.
In March, the flowers seemed that they had never been so happy to show a thousand colours they knew how to create.
But maybe we were constantly distracted, angry, worried, that we did not realize that those colours had always expressed them, but that year they seemed unique.
But in 2012, everything was different and unique.
It felt like we had put all the worries aside in our life. We were just hugging people, smiling on the underground at anyone who crossed our eyes.
Everyone was cheerful, radiant and confident.
What a time to be alive!
The Queen had begun the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of her Kingdom as early as February.
Flags were in every corner of the city, and flags from every nation worldwide were flying from the windows from everyone’s house.
It was not only the British that celebrated, but anyone who lived in the country felt that they were part of what was happening.
In one way, probably even more than the pure English citizen, but distracted lives in some small town in the north of the country.
And I, like everybody else, just had a great party that we’ve never experienced in our life.
Every business was recording its personal sales record; everything was going well.
The oil used for these gears is called ‘motivation’, ‘joy of life’, and glue was the magic word: ‘share’.
A glue that is not bought at the supermarket but formed within people.
On July 27th, the new stadium was built in East London, where the Olympic Games were inaugurated.
The World, and not just Britain, seemed to be oriented towards a cycle of happiness, hope, and joyful life.
We all felt that the work of the last 15 years, everything anyone had done in life, had achieved its goal.
A thousand dreams, projects and hopes came true that evening at the end of July.
No one had any doubts, everything would be perfect from tomorrow.
For about a year it was like this around London. A long Olimpic wave, the mild, almost Mediterranean like weather of that 2012, seemed to drag on even to the following year.
Was a time that If you let yourself go and look into the gardens that every house in London has, you saw Olive trees and Lemons thriving. It was clearly a sign that the climate was different and seemed to be in the South of France, more than in the stereotypical English town.
But something, on the other hand, was changing, and we didn’t immediately notice.
There was no longer a rise in cultural and economic growth ahead of us, but we were like on a plateau, where everything was flat.
We still looked at the rest of the world from above, but we didn’t realize we were in a false plain.
And we were stunned, still drunk on happiness and optimism that a lot of things we didn’t notice were happening.
The signals were around us, but we didn’t see these signs; we couldn’t spot them.
Probably it was just me that I couldn’t see it, but I knew I wasn’t alone in this blindness spot.
But probably the proper analysis was that “we didn’t want to spot them” because we couldn’t believe what was happening was true. Inside us, we cannot accept something was spoiling the party.
2012 was not the starting year for a decade, or perhaps more, better than the previous 20 years. Still, they were the culmination of that climb and the end of a clearly golden period.
Since then, what has happened is still recent history, which we’re experiencing now, at this exact moment.
Brexit and its historical rupture between the people, families, and friendships split, divided and ended inexplicable divisions between different cultures.
Suppose history serves as a warning and a unit of measurement in reading current events.
In that case, we’re faced with the advent of neofascism run by cowardly, greedy and decidedly vindictive people.
People with a humanitarian sense that practically does not exist within their rotten and corrupt soul because money and power are the only reason they live.
BREXIT
On the evening of June 23rd, 2016, I didn’t sleep.
Since that night, I’ve been sleeping rough for a few years.
I didn’t feel comfortable where I was anymore.
I had been cowardly impressed by those citizens of the north of the country. I was right to warn four years earlier that they had no interest in the Olympics, that they did not see them as “their Olympics” but called them the “London Olympics”.
Those people of the north have livery and jealousy towards the south of the country.
It’s a historical issue towards the centre of the power of the economy.
So we, living particularly in London, become the target.
We were creating, we believed it, something extraordinary and cheerful with the people who lived in the capital was not appreciated and didn’t feel what we were feeling.
As fanatical and obtuse armies, they decided to break the game.
Even damaging to themselves, but this masochism and self-flagellation did not interest those because’ the excuse was that they did not have that play in hand. It was not “them at the centre of this country’s life” that were the sentences most heard in interviews.
Personally, I had warned of this kind of hatred towards the south of the country every time I went to see Arsenal away in the north. Hostility was so ferocious and violent that I felt more “abroad” than when I actually went out of Britain.
The quality of life, social relationships in Bolton, Blackpool, Wigan… were decidedly different from those in Balham, Putney or Fulham.
Two worlds were so different that they could not meet if those who ruled the government did not want them to meet.
In fact, they saw the opportunity to control the easy masses with consequent maintenance of personal power to maximize private profit.
“Brexit” was the idea and the key to taking control.
THE LAST FIVE YEARS
The problem was that I couldn’t fight all this on my own, so I went into depression.
For me, certainties of this country and the people living there just became disappointment that I couldn’t compare myself to.
Because the “problem was not simple”, but it was as if I had met Tyson, who decided to train with my body to get back into shape.
The reality was that I did not have the tools for this personal challenge.
I felt lost, and I’ve been for years, and it’s fair to say I still am.
The disappointment and pain still accompany me, and I know I am not the only one in this situation.
Still, my relationships with family and friends have changed.
And I have changed behave with some of them; some friendships have been wholly lost since those days.
Friendships that I thought were important fell apart as happens to the ice in August in the south of Italy if you leave the refrigerator open.
Then the Pandemic and the selfish management of the government, acting with closed mentally, managed in the same way as the campaign for Brexit at the media level.
With just one target in mind, to make the citizens of the UK live in a kind of bubble.
Full of vanity and presumption, that created the crack from which I never know if I will ever come out of, without further damage to my soul.
As a free, open, progressive country, Britain has become a country full of obtuse citizens.
People who believe that the British Empire was kind to be proud of it and make the public behave like hooligans are noble. Instead, it reveals how an entire generation has been repressed in their fundamental ignorance, and they have lost the plot.
Now, this ignorance is shown with its true face publicly, every day and at all levels.
Listening to the radio, watching the news or reading Twitter, it became very difficult to manage without being upset.
Reading the news about reception centres of people rejected at the borders brings down a tear resulting from the internal pain since June 23rd
I still feel disappointed, defeated and angry.
Yes, just angry, furious towards a country and a population where I spent 21 years of my life.
I helped grow and improve in a country with my passion, work, money, and culture.
I was so proud to make it to that country that showed pride to the whole world in 2012.
Now makes me one who rejects this country’s idea, yes, that’s right, will I ever recover from this feeling?
Because I feel betrayed and see so many adjusting to the “Nuovo Potere” (the “new Power“) the , it makes me stay up at night once again. I warn that my mental condition is close to the darkest depression I have ever experienced in my entire life.
I think this is the worst time I’ve remembered in all the decades I’ve followed politics in Europe. It hurts the most because it comes from a country I had always considered the most democratic, visionary and open mind in the world.
An example to follow and a place where you had to be a part of if you have these values inside you. A country where I decided to be a part of and grow and educate my daughter at the sunset of the last century.
Thanks to Youtube, I can point out this video, which acts as a reminder of what they are.
The video I linked above remembers that it is always worth fighting against these really terrible forces. Represented in this case by a minister who makes the chills inside of you every time she opens her mouth.
She is an MP representing a party with the only ideal of destroying all that has a positive value in our society.
Don’t care to risk the peace on our planet and separate and isolate the people of their own country as a first move.
The speech by the minister I pointed out to you reminds me of former smokers who become the most aggressive anti-smokers.
Yes, she is the daughter of immigrants. The refugee daughter and her father had also become a member of UKIP a few years back. ‘A cliché’, you could say, and perhaps you are right, but a c’liché‘ that hurts.
This video, it’s full of populist slogans; it is one of the most horrible things I’ve seen in recent years.
A video that has so much hate, resentment and vitriol, that it’s the last thing you expect, especially from a woman, but this is where we are at the moment.
Then you try to get distracted from this vitriol atmosphere, and you decide to go online.
You visit Twitter or Facebook to put your mind somewhere else.
Unfortunately, you are caught reading the same idiocies from so many other people and feel the same pain when you see a football match or take the bus and decide to keep your headphones on your ears at volume zero.
And it’s the lies, with slogans- such as “take back control”, that make you sick in your stomach.
And it is an incredible contradiction the phrase so prevalent in this years, “regains control”.
At the same time, there has been “zero control” over the deadly virus they brought into the country because of the presumption and incapacity they showed.
An actual crime would have seen, in any other country in the world, the whole government resigned, but not in this Britain right now, no way.
The virus came in and killed more than 150,000 citizens.
And now it seems that the population is even so happy with this ruling class that every poll shows them uphill with electoral support.
HOPES FOR THE FUTURE
I hope that this phase does not last long, that there is a Revolution.
Yes, you read it right, a Revolution.
Moreover, this is as soon as possible because the more time passes, the more this crisis of democracy and identity becomes more and more gloomy and dangerous for the new generations. Its cultural drift can bring negative surprises, perhaps today difficult to pronounce.
The revolution must not be armed, in 2021, it can be and must be different.
But it must be a change as fast as the effect that a revolution would have.
Not only the government and those who ‘manage’ these men now in government must change, but they must also change the mentality and actions of the leaders of the current opposition and the conscience of the voter, who cannot go and vote disinterested, but clearly must be motivated and self-motivated.
It has to happen very quickly, it’s too late already because I want to arrive at my late days without keeping this kind of disappointment.
Because I do not want to have this memory of a country that had made me cry with joys too, hope and given so many motivations, and then the same tears continued incessantly to fall on my face but for different reasons in the last five years.
To feel the pain in seeing and feeling within me this anti-democratic and not at all progressive metamorphosis of a country and a people who have definitely marked my life positively, at least until 2016.
Between depression and disappointment, I leave this long letter to the reader’s judgment because exposing my feelings was a must, now, after years and years of internal suffering.
This, with the end of the harshest phase of the pandemic, was and is the right time to say mine about myself and my sorrows, disappointments, and hopes murdered forever.
Final Notes:
I wrote this story in about a month.
I’ve corrected it a thousand times and tried to limit the intense emotions I’m experiencing in the last few years.
I wrote it because I felt I needed to put my life in black and white on the blog because of Brexit and to have a start point from where to start again on my life.
Thank you if you’ve come to the end of the story and an even bigger thank you if you’ll help me spread it around.
Maybe it might be helpful to someone else who is having a similar experience.By Massimo Usai
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