We are all cretins. Inhumane and racist. Or many of us are. And the ones who never speak up are just as cretinous and despicable. The ones who say “yes it’s wrong to let them drown but…”, those too are insufferable and soulless.
I can never figure out when, or why, we started thinking of ourselves as pure stock, pure Maltese and purely western. Making us feel we are exclusively special, the chosen ones, part of the international elite. Obviously, this special elite feels that western people are better in looks and culture than anyone coming from any other country, race, or region.
Why, after all, are westerners deemed special? And if we are part of this western elite who the hell is this special, god-chosen, strand of people on an island once considered so hospitable to all outsiders?
The way we have developed into a racist and xenophobic bunch we have turned this land into one of sour milk and poisoned honey. Because the way we reason, and the way the authorities act and justify letting people in distress drift off, is neither sweet nor wholesome.
Even some persons who are aghast at what the Government of Malta Ħanina has done underline a slightly skewered vision of society. They rightly attack the racists but they then go on to say that we need them to work for us.
Pigeon-holing people of a different race or colour as the ones who do jobs considered menial is awful and stereotypical. We need to move on and forget this attitude if we really believe we are civilised.
Saving the lives of anyone – wherever they come from and whatever they have done in their lives, whatever their job, job prospects, colour, creed or race – is just the right thing to do. Not just right but obligatory if we are truly human and humane.
Oh but now there is a new mantra going round. A friend laughed at my annoyance at these refugees being abandoned to their fate. He called me holier-than-thou, bird-brained, myopic and fomenter of economic disasters. He said that the people lost or drifting on the sea does not concern him or our country. It is, he said, all the fault of the human traffickers and we cannot fall to these bloodsuckers’ ways.
He also informed me that we are to blame that the traffickers go on trafficking and making their money because we are ready to give the people on these boats haven. So by saving lives we are encouraging the illegal trade in humans.
Away from the discussion of whether to save or not – actually there is no discussion just save – there is a geo-political problem that should be tackled. The west needs to do more to assist and find ways of how to stem the human trafficking and exodus before the people trafficked are put on boats, before they face their harrowing passage and possible death. But letting anyone die for whatever reason – especially as a bargaining chip in future discussions – is simply despicable.
The friend of mine also used quite horrendous descriptors – the ones on the boat, “those people from Africa”, could also be virus-infected, land up in our already over-burdened hospitals and take our space. He seemed to imply that we are superior, they are just traffic, easily disposable.
We, the civilised, the educated, the elite of the world, are not racist in the eyes of this soulless bigot.
When I accused him of not having a heart or soul to be voicing such things, he went into a tirade of insults, saying he thought I was a friend.
If this is civilisation I renounce all vestiges of civilisation. I prefer being a savage or whatever the opposite of civilised is. The man in question is not an uncouth man: he had good schooling, went to University, graduated and seems on the outside as civilised and educated as most people I know.
If this man, and many like him, are what western civilisation is all about and what we are trying to salvage in the fight for survival in the onslaught of the Coronavirus, then I suppose it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if civilisation does die out or transmute beyond recognition.
Seeing how so-called superior humans treat those in dire straits, the Coronavirus might commit hara-kiri. It will depart inconsolable, defeated by our own denial of the sanctity of life. It will feel it failed because, far from defeating us and causing the breakdown of our society, we are our own worst enemies and destroyers. Our willingness to kill each other, to kill the world with our toxins, to cause more pain than a deadly virus can ever unleash, might terrify the virus.
If civilisation cannot, and couldn’t, save a boatful of people now, when we should be so careful about how we tread, how we live, then we are in truly dire straits.
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