There was once an autistic boy who regularly kicked one of the girls in his class on the shin, hard enough to make her scream.  Time after time, his teacher would explain to the boy that it was wrong to kick other children, but it made no difference.  Neither did any sanction that the school imposed.  One morning, as he came into school, the boy dropped his coat.  His teacher screamed, just like the girl did when she was kicked.  The boy never kicked the girl again (although he did drop his coat several times a day).

Autistic people think differently to neuro-typical people.  They often have difficulties with sensory processing:  sometimes under sensitivity, sometimes over sensitivity.  What the teacher realised was that the boy had an under sensitivity to sound and had a desperate need for the sensory stimulation of loud high-pitched sound.  Even though he had been taught that it was wrong, the boy could not resist kicking the girl because it was the only way he knew to get the sensory stimulation for which he was desperate.

Kicking people is wrong.  It is not acceptable for anyone to do this, whatever their needs or difficulties.  It is right and just that this moral rule be clearly stated and enforced.  In this case, however, doing so did not stop the kicking.  Some people might have written the boy off as being mad or bad.  His teacher tried to understand the underlying issue.  She was able to try and think like the child who, being autistic, thought in a very different way to the way in which she thought.  Thinking like people who think in a very different way to you is difficult, but doing so allowed the teacher to understand the underlying issue of why the kicking was happening.  Understanding the underlying issue allowed her to solve the problem.  And solving the problem was, in the end, what allowed everyone to be happier.

My hope (with the forthcoming Italian referendum in mind, as well as the French and German elections) is that mainstream politicians across Europe learn from what has happened in the UK and US and take genuine steps to understand and address the underlying issues.  This is going to be hard, because there aren’t any easy answers to those issues, but the only alternative is to leave it to the far right to argue that kicking people is acceptable after all.  If, however, politicans can find away to address these underlying issues, then it seems probable that the EU will also have to take notice and reform.  This might possibly provide a way for the UK to come back from the brink.  When I reflect on how I voted in the referendum I realise that, although nothing that has happened or that I have read or that I have heard since has made think I made the wrong choice (although much that has happened has been deplorable), my initial belief hasn’t fundamentally changed at all.  The solution I still want is the one that was not on the ballot paper:  for the UK to be part of a reformed EU.

When I talk about the EU reforming, I don’t mean that the EU should bend to the will of one grumpy member state.  “No more renegotiation” was a reasonable position for the EU to take.  I believe that reform would be in the interests of all member states, because it isn’t just in the UK that anti-EU sentiment is rising.  It peaked here first because our relationship with the EU has been distant and fractured for some considerable time.  If the EU doesn’t take notice of what is happening and address people’s concerns then I think it will end up falling apart in a very damaging way.  I am reminded of a couple of personal encounters with Germans that I have heard about.  One was before the referendum where the German person voiced the opinion that he hoped the UK voted Leave, not because he disliked the UK or really wanted them to leave, but because he desperately wanted the EU to reform and he felt it would take a shock of that magnitude to make this happen.  The other encounter, with a different person, was after the referendum but the view expressed was much the same.

Events in the UK & US have rightly posed lots of questions about what sort of community we are living in and what sort of community we want to be living in.  Whatever our goals are for our community, if we set off in pursuit of them without clearly explaining where we are going and at such a pace that sections of our community get left behind, then it doesn’t matter how noble the goals we had for our community were.  We no longer have a community.  With groups of people finding themselves lost, afraid and angry, we have already broken our community.  This will be as true in the future as it is in the present and it has been in the past.