The Ascendancy of the Easy Answer: My under-informed thoughts on the Brexit

With 95% of the total in, it looks as though the populace of Britain has voted to leave the EU. 

Who am I?  I have no qualifications to write on this.  Ten years ago next month I moved back to the US after two years as a graduate student in London, an illuminating and priceless experience.  And an experience that was, again, 10 years ago.  The people I am still acquainted with in England are either Eastern European friends or English people I sang with at a church in Fulham.  Everyone I know there thought this was a terrible idea and has been aghast at the entire proceeding. 

From this side of the Atlantic, it looks as if the Brexit was viewed by many as the easy answer.  If you think and read enough, you normally come to believe that easy answers do not exist.  Who do you blame for the economic challenges in your life?  Who do you blame for all that is wrong in your community and country?  It is much easier to blame Europe.  It is much easier to blame the people who don't look or speak like you, the people who weren't so numerous when you were younger and times were better.  It is much easier to let this be their fault. It is much easier to kill an MP than work to form a rational argument against what she has to say.

I fear that we are entering dark times as a species and as a planet.  So much is wrong and none of the answers are simple. 

My country is facing its own horrible choice in November.  I know what I won't do, but I haven't yet decided what I will do. 

Donald Drumpf appears to me as an American style Brexit in that he is an easy answer, albeit an easy answer with a bad hairdo.  Rather than facing the fact that our leaders have lied to us and sold us out with their neoliberal policies, elephant and donkey alike, many voters will look at the Other and blame them.  They will look at the Mexican immigrant who has a job, a job they would probably never take but a job none the less, and say that person took the job from someone like me.  They will look at the violence in their community, and rather than examining the closet of guns in their own house, they will blame the guy who worships at the mosque down the street.  Dare I say that this new demogogue says just enough that IS true to lend a sheer of legitimacy to all he says with no basis in reality.  Yet these lies are easy to accept because they do not require thought.  They do not require self-examination. 

God save us all from the tyranny of accepting the easy answer.