LONDON — "Brexit" may turn out to be the United Kingdom's Berlin Wall moment, with a twist — everyone will remember where they were when it happened, but while for some the bricks are coming down, for others they’re going up.
Most people here seem to accept that leaving the European Union could affect just about everything, from jobs to cheap airline tickets to the number of Spanish soccer stars playing in the Premier League to easy finger-pointing at EU bureaucrats in Brussels.
Former London mayor Boris Johnson may finally tame his signature bedhead blond bombshell look for a hairstyle more in keeping with his prime ministerial ambitions, if not his oratorical devotion to classical allusions.
For now, for all that, the best plumber in the village is still Polish or Latvian. The entrepreneurial tech genius down the road is Estonian. Croissants remain legal breakfast tender.
There will probably be two years of exit negotiations before the scone is elevated back to its place atop the British baked goods firmament.
But the result has come as an extraordinarily deep shock and aggravated wounds already extremely tender, after a bitter, four-month-long referendum campaign that pitted politician against politician, yes, but also mother vs. daughter and neighbor contra neighbor. The vote has been a family affair.
It goes without saying that there was a fierce showdown on social media between #CatsForBrexit and #BunniesAgainstBrexit.
(The smart money, as feline fanciers will knowingly tell you, turned out to be on #retractileclaws.)
Disclosure: I have a horse in this race. I am an EU migrant who has been on the receiving end of some of the cross-border policy that is now threatened by this rupture.
I lived in the U.K. for more than a decade. I even married into it.
During this time, I always observed it to be a thoroughly divided place: working class vs. middle; town vs. country; north vs. south; those who think the longest-reigning monarch in British history is a precious national treasure vs. those who consider Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the royal family a national embarrassment.
Half of Britons think it's entirely reasonable to spread a black-as-night concentrated yeast extract called Marmite on toast; the other retches at the prospect.
Periods of great uncertainty or trauma — the London Underground terrorist attacks, the death of Princess Diana, the 2008 financial crisis — have tended to unite Britons.
The sharply divisive nature of this referendum makes that almost impossible now.
I have never seen this place succumb to such acidic sectarianism as it has following last week's vote on EU membership.
It's not hyperbole or hysteria to say that many "leave" and "remain" voters absolutely despise each other.
More than 3 million people have signed a petition calling for a redo of the vote. But Prime Minister David Cameron has already ruled out a second vote. We’ll skip over the fact that the first one isn't legally binding anyway.
Let's be clear about this: There's been no civil unrest yet like there was in Germany in 1989 before all the pushing past border guards and scrambling over barriers as crowds of East Germans joined their brethren in West Germany.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is because as the EU contract gradually gets torn up or rewritten, there is no actual, physical "British Wall" to go up or down.
Bricklaying of that kind is for Donald Trump. Britons like to call each other names, but it usually stops there.
That does not lessen the atmospheric confusion right now.
As it stands, for every victorious "leave" voter who feels the U.K. has just had its Independence Day, there is a seething "remain" counterpart who is distraught that a force of incredible magnitude has arrived for its mission of total annihilation. It's not starring Will Smith or Jeff Goldblum.
Former USA TODAY London correspondent Hjelmgaard is now based in Berlin.
