Review of 'How to Stay Sane in an age of division' by Elif Shafak

A bit disappointed iwth this...it ought to be good, she's a brave person and (I think) a good writer. It's about not building walls between yourself and others, which is important though so very difficult.  It's so easy to believe that everyone thinks the same as we do, and to lose touch with how people outside our bubble are understanding the world and dealing with its troubles. Brexit, and Trump, and now some of the strange responses to the pandemic are evidence of this.

Of course she's a writer, not a political strategist, but I think she doesn't make enough of a distinction between reaching out to those people who are thinking differently to us, and making common cause with the people who are deliberately misleading them. There is a universe of difference between the working class people who voted for Brexit (or Trump) against their own interests, and people like Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings. We need to reach out to the former, and reaching out means actually listening and understanding their ideas, even if we might not agree with them. We need to stand together against the latter, because they are really nasty and have nasty plans for all of us.