Well, what a year this has been, and it’s not over yet.  The election result in the USA last week was for me, the sledgehammer blow of realisation; we are not progressing. Right now humanity is hopeless.

And to my nieces and nephews I say: sorry.

I thought we were better than this.  I thought we were paving the way for a bright future.  We seemed to have come so far; multicultural, inclusive, ecologically aware, stronger together.  Naive, hopeful; call it what you will.  Then there was Brexit, and then there was Trump.  Two of the supposed most influential countries in the world chose to turn in on themselves, and their backs on a safe and progressive future.  Around the world cultural division is growing, war continues to rage, isolationism is de rigueur, millions of people are being displaced, arms are still being sold.

Last week’s Remembrance Day couldn’t have been a more appropriate time to look at what’s happening in the world.  Our grandfathers, your great grandfathers, did not serve their country during the Second World War, so that we could begin morphing into the very thing they fought against, just two generations later.  They’d be devastated.

I’m worried where this is going.  I am worried about the future.  And no amount of telling me, and the rest of the disappointed ‘liberal elites’, as we’ve been labeled (the most ludicrous and ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my entire life) that it’s not that bad, people are voting for change and that’s democracy; can allay our fears.  Marine LePen was among the first to congratulate both Farage and Trump, on their victories.  I fear she will be the Right’s next success.  Emboldened by the growing wave of shocking political results across the globe, people are keeping their true feelings off the record and silently posting them in the ballot boxes.  The completely off-the-mark polls of both Brexit and the US election paid testament to that.  And that’s terrifying.  People are unhappy and want change, but the direction they’re taking is back to the beginning of the last century.  And that’s no place or way to live.  But my future is only forty or so years more, you have your whole lives ahead of you.  What awaits you there?

We can only continue to do what we can to educate, to vote for progress, protest negativity and hate and make a positive contribution to society, and hope that this current wave of fear and hate is stopped dead in its tracks – before it causes irreversible damage.  For you, your lives and your future families; long after we’ve turned to dust.