Speaking from the heart is pointless unless your heart is in the right place, and that is why the prime minister comes across so well when he is required to speak about matters that demand of us humanity and compassion. At a public meeting some days ago, he was asked the usual questions, probably by the usual suspects, about the influx of migrants to our shores. His reply was spot on. “Yes, it is an enormous problem,” he said. “But are the Maltese generous only when it involves calling in to L-iStrina with a Lm10 donation, in the hope of winning a mobile phone?” He said that we can’t call ourselves generous simply because we have raised Lm1 million for the victims of a tsunami 3000 miles away, when closer to home we are unable to treat people like people. He politely ticked off his interlocutor: “Are you telling me to ignore a request to rescue a mother and her child, stranded in a leaking boat engulfed by 10-foot waves? I am not talking about the legal obligations here; I am talking about the moral obligations. How do you expect me to sleep at night if I ignore these people? Yes, it’s a problem, and yes, I understand that some people have concerns because there is an open centre for immigrants next to their homes. But we are dealing with people here, and not with animals, for goodness sake.”
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The thing is that to many among us, these are not people, but a higher form of animal life. And in answer to the prime minister’s question: yes, it is being suggested to him that he ignores the calls for help from drowning people. The general verdict appears to be: let them drown, but don’t tell us about it.
At least this is one short step up from shooting them at sea. One of my sons, who is in the sixth form at a church school, came home one day even more bothered than usual. It eventually emerged that there had been a debate about the “boat people” problem in one of his English classes, and that he had stayed out of it. When I expressed my surprise, given that he has clear ideas on the matter and has spoken about them, he told me: “There was no point in getting involved. They were all saying that they should be packed onto planes and sent home even if they are killed when they go back, that they should be left to drown. One of them even said they should be given a warning at sea and then shot if they ignored it, and he’s taking religion for A-level.” Not having my combative personality (I would have been right in there, and enjoyed every minute of the battle), he decided to keep his mouth shut and wouldn’t even speak when asked a direct question by the teacher, who hoped that he might contribute a more enlightened view to the frightening proceedings.
While I understood his wish to have no part of it, I pointed out to him that it is crucial to speak out with a dissenting voice in that kind of situation, and it is precisely because it is so difficult, and requires a certain amount of courage and assurance, that it has to be done, so as not to allow the baying ignorance of others to take over uncontested. I explained how he had just been through a classic example of how intolerance works by silencing others who hold different views. Challenging those views just seems like too much bother; the people who need to be challenged might seem too pig-ignorant, too complacent and unshakable in their convictions. But they can’t be allowed to think they are right, or that their morality is in order.
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People confuse the right to express an opinion with the validity of the opinion expressed. Yes, of course everyone has the right to express an opinion, but that does not mean that everyone’s opinion is valid. The two are not the same thing. Some opinions are very, very invalid indeed. A wrong-headed opinion rooted in misinformation, error and superstition can in no way be deemed valid, though the right to express that opinion should not be called into question. A stupid, evil, or immoral opinion is just that: stupid, evil and immoral. Something that is stupid, evil and immoral cannot also be valid.
The same mistake is made by those people who say “I respect your opinion, but…” when they are faced with the ‘blacks should be shot at sea’ viewpoint. What they mean is that they respect the right of the person in question to express his opinion, and instead make the mistake of saying that they respect the opinion itself. How can any decent person respect the opinion that people in peril on the seas should be shot rather than rescued?
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More leaders among us should speak out clearly and humanely as the prime minister has done, instead of trying to assuage the concerns of many Maltese, which are largely rooted in selfishness, ignorance, and xenophobia. It is a general fear of “the other”, amply illustrated by the letter of one man to a newspaper, in which he expressed his concern about his 16-year-old daughter having to take the bus in the evening when there are all these immigrants about. It is quite obvious that he was never a 16-year-old girl in Malta. The several times I was accosted when I was 16, on one occasion being forced to ring the doorbell of a stranger’s home to get away from the man who was bothering me, it was by men who were obviously Maltese. I don’t think the situation is any better for the current crop of 16-year-olds. It was just as dreadful when I was in my 20s and used to walk along the Sliema seafront every winter evening after putting the babies to bed. I lost count of the number of masturbators, flashers, and weirdos springing out from behind bus shelters. There are so many sexually disturbed men around, and they’re Maltese. Ask any fairly presentable woman about her past or current experiences on a Maltese beach. Those experiences will almost certainly involve an army of Maltese men exposing themselves or worse. If you get a group of Maltese women talking about the subject, they just won’t stop swapping anecdotes. That happened at dinner the other day, and the men around the table
were squirming with embarrassment, until one of them actually asked us to change the subject. True, it was rather rude of us to exclude them like that, but this is a topic over which we become very exercised.
A few years ago, I looked up from my newspaper at Ghajn Tuffieha when I heard a man ask me the time (how original). The man in question was stark naked, and his accent told me he was Maltese. I did what I am best at: pretending not to notice. My face expressionless, I told him the time and returned to my newspaper, zoning him out. I imagine he was disappointed that I didn’t shriek, jump up and call him a dirty bastard. After a while, he left and tried it on with somebody else. I have yet to see a non-Maltese man behave like this.
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But that’s by the by. Put some spin into the public sphere, and watch it go round and round. Right now, the only one doing the spinning when it comes to issues of immigration is that pretentious troll. And I must say, he’s pretty good at it. I know because I hear his rubbish being repeated on the streets, even by people who are supposed to be educated. The other day I had a chat with a woman I know well, and who is not educated at all, though she has a fair level of intelligence and is quite humane, rescuing any stray that comes her way. I could see that her natural inclination towards compassion for these people (“Jahasra! Kemm nithassarhom!”) was in conflict with something she had been told. “They want to take over,” she told me, tentatively, waiting for my reaction. “They’re leaving Africa and they want to take over Europe.” By “they”, of course, she meant black people and Muslims. She warmed to her theme: “They’ll marry Maltese girls and the Maltese girls will have black babies and Muslim babies, and then they’ll take over.” I burst out laughing. Then we had a civilised talks about it, but I could see that this business of taking over was still burning away in her mind.
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Harry Vassallo and his people appear to believe that house prices can fall in a vacuum. For all the letters they put after their names – an embarrassing and ill-advised practice – and for all their assurances that they have studied economics (we can all breath easy now), they seem not to understand that a downwards movement in the market price for property has a knock-on effect throughout the economy. That knock-on effect is negative, not positive. Anything that causes house prices to fall is bad news for the economy and bad news for almost everyone in it. People with very little education may be forgiven for looking at the matter in isolation and thinking “Oh, cheaper houses – that’s a good thing”, but in people with a bridal train of letters after their names this is unforgivable. When spouting their theories all over the newspapers – my goodness, how much space they take up with their largely invalid opinions – they should bear in mind the premise that is drummed into the heads of all first-time economics students: “all things being equal”. In real life, they never are. Real life is a matter of corralling and controlling the variables.
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People should be told that house prices fall only in specific situations – situations which mean that they remain unaffordable to the majority because of widespread job losses, erosion of savings, shrivelling up of consumer spending, and long queues at the social security counter. Yes, house prices were much lower in Malta in 1984, in real terms and in comparison to earnings. But there was a reason for this, and that reason was the state of the economy and the general deprivation in which we lived. Is anyone, apart from those who might be suffering from false memory syndrome, prepared to lay his hand on his heart and say that he would be willing to live now as he lived then in return for the privilege of buying a cheap house? But that would not be possible, of course – not only because there are no time machines, but also because the houses we view as “cheap” through the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia, were not cheap at all to the young adults starting out then. A Lm20,000 house was even more unaffordable to them then than a Lm100,000 house would be to a young couple today. If you think people earn peanuts now, then I’ll have to remind you that in 1984 they earned the shells of peanuts. When house prices are cheap, it invariably means that people are poor.