Of bankruptcies and Brexits

It was odd that though I spent most of my time for days thinking through the implications of my employer’s failure (and by association my own), I felt more in command of my fate last Wednesday than I did earlier in the week, when I deliberately clouded my mind and determined to accept the comforting nostrums given to us in Monday’s series of town halls and meetings.  I may in fact be wrong in my assessments, but the sheer act of working through the appearance of a logical sequence of events provided me with more of a sense that I was an active participant in the process, rather than a passive spectator or victim being asked to keep to a holding pattern until further notice.  Overlaid on my “thinking through,” and the conversations I had in which I tried to do that thinking aloud and see if it still held together, was a half hour of listening to the British parliament debate and then vote on a vote of no confidence, which somehow reinforced my conviction that I was approaching events in the right way: the British debate, unlike a comparable American political debate, seemed forthright, clear, intelligible and yet more intelligent than I could possibly have managed to be in such a setting, one in which every statement was subject to uproarious contention but at the same time equally uproarious support, and in which the quality of speaking was itself a subject of debate and almost of critique in the course of coming to a very serious conclusion.