A Swiss man who has run a company here for many years sent me this e-mail message. “What is happening now in Malta is not new. It is happening in other European countries as well, including Switzerland. The arguments are always the same – ‘they are a danger to our culture and identity’, or even more stupid, ‘if more of them come, we might become racists’. This is a way of passing the blame for our own failure onto the targets and victims of racism. How insecure some people must be about their culture and identity – whatever that is meant to be – if they are afraid of losing both because of around 1200 klandestini! What cowards. I admit, the situation with the migrants is not pleasant, and we would rather not have this problem. But after all, the problem is purely a logistical one: how to feed and shelter 1200 people – that’s it. The problem can be resolved with some managerial skills and good will; that’s all that is needed. But this society makes a crisis and what-have-not out of this. What I call a crisis is being hit by an earthquake or a bad hurricane. As long as our main problem is to avoid becoming too fat, then I can’t accept the argument that we cannot feed these refugees.”

He’s right, of course. Pro-blems are best solved with a pragmatic approach to the logistics, and not with a hysterical attitude that plays on the emotions, or which believes that the problem is one of great magnitude, when it isn’t. And yes, like him I am astonished that there are people who are screaming that this is a crisis we are facing. If this is a crisis, then how would they describe the terrible scenes that are being broadcast from Kashmir, the devastation that was broadcast from hurricane-stricken New Orleans? The unmitigated horror of the tsunami in southeast Asia, only 10 months ago but already forgotten? The current levels of starvation in Niger? The struggle for survival in Liberia? The struggle for democracy in Iraq? The quashing of human rights

and personal liberty in Uzbekistan? The people who protest that the presence of 1200 immigrants, locked up fast behind wire and kept in tents, is a crisis, must live in a world entirely of their own making, floating around in a little bubble detached from reality. It’s what I call life in a hamster’s cage, going from food trough to treadmill to straw bed to water-bottle. The hamster thinks that the entire world is composed of his cage, but it isn’t.

* * *

We fail to realise how silly we seem, in our protesting and posturing and fussing over this ‘huge problem’, to others who have truly great problems to deal with on a routine basis. Because we have been sheltered from reality for so long, protected by the cotton-wool of isolated island life and an economy that was protectionist for so many years, we are only beginning to discover what life is all about, and how harsh reality can be. For generations, we were deprived materially, intellectually and socially, but on the other hand, we were also terribly spoilt by being protected from the necessity of having to make difficult decisions in a complex society.

I find a close comparison can be made between our sheltered island society as a whole and women who live for decades as housewives, with their entire world made up of the children and the four walls of their home. Over the years, they lose touch with what it means to be part of daily life outside the home, with the ability to tackle real problems. They experience a gradual but fundamental shift in perspective, without even realizing that it is happening. The small bother of a leaking tap or a stuck lock or a malfunctioning fridge looms massive on their horizon. It takes over their day or even their week. Footprints in the hall become the reason for a household screeching match. The need to keep a clean house becomes paramount, obscuring all else. The mess caused by the children takes on the proportions of the mess caused by Hurricane Katrina.

This shift of perspective is further highlighted by the fact that the most sheltered women are often married to the least sheltered men. Their protection from the daily turmoil of real life is made possible by their husband’s full exposure to it, usually through a job that carries tremendous decision-making responsibilities, or the back-breaking weight of running a company or corporation. The husband and wife then end up inhabiting two different worlds: the husband the real world where a problem means taking a decision on whether or not to make redundant 100 people with families to support; the wife the LaLa Land where a problem is a stain on the new carpet. We, like the wife, have lived in LaLa Land for too long.

* * *

We have lost the ability to see ourselves through the eyes of others, if we ever had it in the first place, and this is a tragedy. The ability to see yourself as others do is essential to keeping a proper sense of perspective and to placing problems in context. On a daily basis, I come across people with absolutely no sense of self-awareness. They are in the room but oblivious to it. They are with people, but oblivious to them. They do not adjust their behaviour or their speech to the circumstances, as required. They are entirely unaware that such adjustment may be necessary. They bluster on regardless, shouting in Sliema English in a village grocery, wearing black to weddings, answering their mobile telephones while Joseph Calleja is singing on stage, laughing and chatting on the church parvis at funerals, as though they are at the latest cocktail party, looking at parents trying to pluck their dead children from the wreckage of their Kashmiri homes as though it is a show put on for their entertainment, like Desperate Housewives, and then sitting down to write a letter to the newspapers about the ‘terrible crisis’ of 1,200 extra mouths to feed, as though they are being obliged to personally spoon-feed them. And worse still, they think it is the realists who are detached from reality.

* * *

To see things as they really are, we have to practice being outsiders, standing outside ourselves and looking on. To me, this is a habit – a personality trait magnified a hundred times over by the need to observe so as to write this column. If we can’t do it ourselves, then we must at least listen to others who can, instead of asking them to mind their own business. A Wylie Cunningham, a resident of Malta who lives in Balzan, wrote this letter to The Times, which many of you may have missed. It bears repeating. “ ‘Malta first!’ they bellow. ‘Malta must stand alone! Malta must take unilateral action!’ Indeed. And against whom and using what, pray tell? The ‘who’ is easy. According to the latest official statistics, the refugees in Malta represent 33 different countries. Is Malta planning to take them all on simultaneously, or one at a time? The ‘what’ is even easier. Is Malta planning to deploy its massive commercial and economic strength, or its overwhelming military might? A reality check is long overdue! ... Extremists of any hue have one thing in common: they always represent themselves as offering the way out of chaos. It is a lesson of history that in 99 cases out of 100, they first work to create that chaos. If I were a Maltese voter, rather than a guest who loves this country, I would be asking all these strange organisations with their banners and their slogans and their marches just what is the vested interest they have in destabilising Malta. Even more pertinently, I would be asking who is financing them.”

* * *

The other day, while I was ploughing down Republic Street in a fug of two-inch zips, Valletta licence plates clearly visible beneath women’s trousers, bra straps on display, small polyester pieces worn by large fleshy women, and black, black, black and more black, I was pleasantly surprised to see a bird of paradise. She was at least six feet tall and with the willowy grace of a Vogue model (not Kate Moss). She was wearing a beautiful pinkish-orange dress that billowed around her in chiffon silk, breathtaking shoes, and a contrasting hat. She was walking with an equally gorgeous man and they were clearly on their way to or from some special ceremony and had decided to take an impromptu walk down to see the cathedral. They stood out like pieces of jewellery in a sea of gravel: true beauty, stunningly dressed. They could not have been more obviously not Maltese, which prompted pretty much the same reaction around them as if they had been black Africans wearing full tribal garb. Giggles. Nudges. Turning heads followed by spluttering laughter. Expletives. “Ara dawk!” “Ara dik! X’inhi liebsa!” On the way home I thought that this was rather a good metaphor for life in this tiny society: all those plain if not downright ugly people, squalidly dressed in their scruffy, badly-put-together get-ups, flashing their thongs and their bras and their polyester, laughing at the sort of fabulous creature I usually see only in the pages of Vogue. In their eyes, she was a freak and they were normal. Yes, their assessment was correct, but their interpretation of it was anything but. Ugly clothes and an unkempt appearance may be normalised by everyday prevalence, but this does not make them correct or desirable. And it certainly did not make them beautiful and well-dressed, nor her ugly and ridiculous.