Without a Vision the People Perish
		by David Wood
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Without a vision the people perish. Dream dreams.
A few years ago I stood on a cliff in Brittany overlooking the French harbour of Brest where the German U-boat fleet used to sally forth during the 1939-45 war to harass allied shipping. There is a memorial there to what is known as the Battle of the Atlantic. 739 U-boats out of a fleet of 1070 were destroyed, 30,000 German sailors mainly aged 18-20 died. 45,000 allied seamen perished in this conflict.
But I'm also looking today at 1 August 1944. On that day a desperate, impossible battle began in Warsaw between a rag-tag partisan Polish army, emboldened by D-Day and the final pressure being brought to bear on Nazi Germany, and the German occupying forces. 63 days later the city of Warsaw had been razed to the ground and 275,000 lay dead. (see the film The Pianist, get the video from the library).
Just a few European statistics in a horrifying bill of account. These figures alone justify the growth of the European Community to 25 members from the 1st May: Poland amongst others has now joined. What an achievement 50 years after it all. We are slowly learning, and it is a long lesson, that we can no longer use other nations as pawns in a great chess game played by those who are bigger and stronger; no longer use them as trade-offs, as less important human beings in the whole scheme of things. This is the sort of harmony, the sort of peace that so many fought and died for throughout the twentieth century. The sort of vague dream that somehow the killing simply has to stop.
It needs to be said constantly to those who wish to become isolationist, G.B. versus The Rest, that so much of our being British is already European. We share already so much genetic cross-fertilisation going down the centuries and our cultures are impregnated with each other - music, art, literature, foods and now pop art, pop culture, pop sport. Of course it is right to be cautious in any drawing closer, and we Brits are very pragmatic and suspicious (we are an island people). We are consequently an eleventh hour nation, acting later often than others which has sometimes put us in mortal peril.
Equally the collective pain of all humanity goes back a long, long time. This needs recognising. Echoes from our long distant past and hidden histories still awaken our fear and aggression. Each nation has these submerged folk memories, whilst all the living memories of the last hundred years are still very fresh and the daily reported histories of what is happening all around us in the world easily rekindle those fears: we are afraid of being invaded, swamped, overrun, of becoming slaves, of losing our identity. Also these days infiltrations seem to be more subtle leaking in subliminally through immigrants, refugees, advertising, the internet and world-wide web. Who are we? What are we? Who am I? So it becomes easier and feels safer to pull up the national drawbridge, to dislike the unlike. After all history seems to show that we have been let down so many times.
But we are meant to draw ever closer together. It is the meaning of life. As modern physics reveals everything is meant to be interconnected. Faith in humankind (and a proper faith in God) also reveals this as part of our human nature. To treat others as enemies, aliens, is sub-human. By myself I am nothing, a nonentity .My own life only starts to get coloured in and take on imagination and vitality through its contact with other people .Interaction. Interdependence. Not to reach out is to stunt growth.
Take a good marriage, a sustained loving partnership. I know many people who know they are in really good marriages and say that being married to Angelique or Stefan is the best thing that ever happened to them. They have grown into a different person, a better human being, have discovered unique gifts in themselves they never knew were there, become more independent, self-reliant, have lost many of their fears. Have changed from a caterpillar, shedding the cramped encasing of the chrysalis, into a brilliant butterfly. Of course from time to time it's hard work, through thick and thin can become very thin. Learning new things, new ways, can be a bumpy ride, yet very different people can make marvellous, if tumultuous, marriages.
That's the small picture but it is how we are meant to be as peoples and nations. Growing up together is the essence of what it is to be human; and for God-believers what it is to be divine in this life. To promote political views which want a divorce from other nationalities is, albeit unconsciously, a massive self-deceit, a self-defeating delusion. It deforms the whole meaning of life. So, we are being called out not to be Europeans who weakly happen to be British, but to become truly British by learning to be Europeans. Our unique identity as an island people is not cast in stones hewed in the past. It will be revealed by refusing to dislike the unlike, to learn from them and with them and they from us what it is to be a real human being.
At least the killing has stopped, so far. Make welcome Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and the other strange names and languages. Dream it. Live it. Without this vision all peoples will perish.

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