Sunday, May 16, 2010
Preparing for cultural shock
Those of us at Birmingham today will face a bit of a cultural shock.
Getting close to our MPs (at least the ministerial variety) will be rather harder than before. In crowded public places they will be moving with a more or less discrete police screen. Given that a lot of our strength as a party has come from good informal discussions at conferences and suchlike this has implications for the future. Even getting photographed with a senior figure for FOCUS usage will be a bit more of a hassle, I expect.
Cultural Shock in general is something we all need to watch for in the next few months.
The classic form strikes people who go to live and work (rather than just have a holiday) in another country. The first stage is a kind of elevated semi-euphoria, with a tendency to notice the positive aspects of the situation. This comes from the need to justify to oneself the benefits of having taken a really big decision. The next stage however is a substantial downer, with niggles petty or otherwise really hurting . And memories of life previously get the golden nostalgia treatment. Then, if things work out reasonably, a kind of balance emerges.
It will happen to us. Let’s be prepared for this and realise it would happen in some way even if we won an absolute majority on our own and were working through the consequences.
Getting close to our MPs (at least the ministerial variety) will be rather harder than before. In crowded public places they will be moving with a more or less discrete police screen. Given that a lot of our strength as a party has come from good informal discussions at conferences and suchlike this has implications for the future. Even getting photographed with a senior figure for FOCUS usage will be a bit more of a hassle, I expect.
Cultural Shock in general is something we all need to watch for in the next few months.
The classic form strikes people who go to live and work (rather than just have a holiday) in another country. The first stage is a kind of elevated semi-euphoria, with a tendency to notice the positive aspects of the situation. This comes from the need to justify to oneself the benefits of having taken a really big decision. The next stage however is a substantial downer, with niggles petty or otherwise really hurting . And memories of life previously get the golden nostalgia treatment. Then, if things work out reasonably, a kind of balance emerges.
It will happen to us. Let’s be prepared for this and realise it would happen in some way even if we won an absolute majority on our own and were working through the consequences.
Labels: coalitions, cultural shock, psychology
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