It is astonishing – or perhaps not? – that the newspaper stories about the drowning of 500 Palestinian ‘boat people’ off Malta, including 70 children, have attracted almost no comments from internet readers while the story about a stork being shot down in Marsa has pulled in hundreds and has been shared repeatedly on Facebook.

This is what we have come to. We have gone from being a society which shoots everything out of the sky and pulls everything out of the sea, with absolutely no public reaction, to one which makes more fuss about the death of a stork than it does about the prolonged suffering and drowning in terrible circumstances of 500 people who were trying to escape the relentless assault in their own country. These were not economic migrants, and though that should not make their deaths more affecting, the prejudice against economic migrants is so great that it has to be said. These were refugees from severe conflict, violence, shelling and the destruction of their homes.

Just a few men in their 20s were plucked alive from the sea, after spending two or three days treading water and clinging to wreckage in desperate circumstances and with scant hope that their plight and position were known and that they would be rescued. Floating and treading water for days when you know that help is on the way is one thing. Doing so when you think that nobody knows you’re there is quite another. The few men who survived said that there were many who made it through in the water for two days and nights, but then drowned when the weather turned bad and they were already severely weakened by exposure and lack of sleep, food and water. One of the airlifted survivors made it through all that, only to die in the air upon rescue.

As our own sons (and daughters) leave Malta to forge careers and lives for themselves elsewhere, with the comfort of citizenship of a European Union member state and the passport and privileges that go with it, the least we could do is have the most basic shred of decency and spare a thought for all those young men and women who, without that precious passport, with so few advantages to begin with, and then with bombs, outrages and assault to contend with on top of that, have been driven to leave their country in the most dangerous way possible. The impossibility of their situation drove them to take that massive and terrible risk, and it didn’t pay off: disadvantage heaped upon disadvantage, setback upon danger, finally ending in the most horrible of deaths.

It is not only those unlucky young men in their 20s who have drowned, because they don’t have the EU passport we take for granted and which 45% of the Maltese electorate, including our prime minister and all his ministers and hangers-on, voted against, and which much of Scotland will vote against today. Whole families have died together, but our sympathy is with the stork.

Does this mean that we have suddenly become so environmentally conscious that we prize the life of one bird, because it is more attractive and far less numerous than a chicken, way beyond that of 500 human beings? No, it just means that we are becoming shallower by the year, and that our social exchanges on the internet are contributing hugely to this exponential increase in ‘surface reasoning’ and frivolity. The Maltese are not naturally inclined to be shallow and frivolous. No society forged in hardship is that way. Look at the people of Lampedusa, how they come out in force to help rescue the drowning, how they empathise with their plight, how they recognise the fact that these are other human beings – and this despite the way their lives have been turned upside down by the consequences of waves of arrivals. The people of Lampedusa still live close to the margin themselves, and this despite the EU citizenship they share with us.

I think it is the way we have gone from hardship, privation and isolation virtually overnight (so to speak), to comfort, prosperity, employment, a good and varied economy, and life and career opportunities that we never would have thought possible, besides the widened horizons of an EU passport, that has made us so shallow and so callous. Instead of underscoring just how lucky we are, the relatively sudden change has made us silly and selfish. For there is no doubt that 20 years or so are sudden, in the historical context of many centuries of privation and subsistence on the edge of civilisation, surmounted by our identification with that part of Europe which was locked behind the Berlin wall and the Iron Curtain of totalitarian communism.

The silliness was on maximum display last year, but remains fully evident in the matter of the stork. Do we care about the stork? Not really. We just know that it is fashionable to pretend to care about the stork and to express shock that a stork was shot. Uploading ‘shot stork’ links on Facebook with trite comments makes us feel ever so cool and part of a herd which we fail to realise is looking increasingly brainless. Uploading ‘500 people drowned’ links, not so much.

Most people here wouldn’t even know what a stork looks like anyway, were it not for those ‘Congratulations on your new baby’ cards that give them some vague idea of the shape – and it’s a safe bet that many of those who pick those cards don’t even know that that’s supposed to be something called a stork, because the concept of babies delivered by the stork does not exist in our culture.

If 500 cats had drowned, rest assured that there would not have been the silence and indifference with which the drowning of 500 people has been met. The silliest, stupidest and most shallow members of our society (and that’s saying something) would have been out in force all over social media and the newspapers, with demonstrations organised along Republic Street or the Sliema/Gzira promenade, to raise awareness about the terrible suffering of cats and the dreadful wet fate of 500 of them. In the Old Testament, when societies become this frivolous and ridiculous, with their priorities in a twist, God generally sends down a plague or a flood to teach them a lesson, or turns the lot of them into pillars of salt. I have the uneasy sensation that this has happened already.