Things have certainly changed. Does our fast declining fertility rate indicate that the goddess of fertility is no longer watching over us? Are we creating new gods in this country that cannot be without its gods?

And have these repeated frenzies brought about by the ever-rising sum of money in the Super 5 lottery prize, created a new and far more harmful goddess – the goddess of gambling?

I had been concerned about the privatisation of the whole lottery set up in the sense that I thought there would be even less controls and even more encouragement to gamble and to stake larger amounts. I was and am totally concerned at the way governments all over the world allow one form of gambling and penalise others. When you think about it, it seems odd that the State provides an activity which really destroys so many families, raises false hopes, crushes not only dreams, but

does away with the most basic of needs when money is spent where it plainly should not be. Gambling is hardly a good thing is it, and for the State to provide it is dubious in itself.

So, in one sense privatising the lotteries did make sense because it meant that the State absolved itself of appearing to be the one behind gambling. So our gambling was privatised, there is a regulator, but is the government really in control? More worrying, are people in control? All over Malta hundreds if not thousands of families are actually buying less food, necessities and what not to be able to gamble as much as they possibly can.

And funnily enough, it is often the poorest who gamble the most, at least proportionately. The ones who should gamble least gamble most because they feel they have so little to lose but so much to gain. People who are well off can never understand this, but it is always the poor who are the most reckless, who are the most likely to smoke and drink heavily, who are the most likely to divorce even though this will often, and particularly for women, only increase their poverty. The obsession with this roll over lottery is testimony to the madness of this society.

People baulked at paying Lm2 for a prescription in Alfred Sant’s time, but happily spend it on a packet of cigarettes. People baulk at spending Lm2 a week more on electricity bills, but happily blow a minimum of Lm2 away for an hour or less on tombola or cards or whatever. I suppose money spent on our pleasure is considered fine, but money spent on necessities like food and heating is something we resent and expect it to be as cheap as possible and for the government to control.

Yet it must be possible for the government to intervene now and limit the amount the prize can go up to. I know it makes money from this private company through taxation, but if it is true that more than one million liri was gambled last week for the prize of a third of that, the price and the prize is much too high for this country to pay

There is generally too much gambling going on, and the scene is very ugly. The battle over Sea Malta is a case in point. All these strikes, demonstrations, attacking of ministers and trade union leaders in the press are appalling. It’s just macho brinkmanship, yet all these men seem to forget we are talking about the livelihood of real families, real dads, mums and kids who are helpless in this atmosphere of might is right, and I will rule.

At the end of the day, was it better not to have a job than to have one where you had to spend 14 or 21 days at sea? Better to have a job naturally. Tony Zarb and Austin Gatt should have been locked in a room and not allowed to leave until they had found a solution that guaranteed these workers and their families a job.

And please Tony, angry people, angry words, strikes and threats just turn up the heat but the government and us, the taxpayers who fund the government, cannot find people a job. The private sector has to create jobs with all the encouragement possible from an educated work force, a thankfully efficiently run ETC, cooperative and intelligent unions and a proactive government.

It feels like this country has been taken over by the gambling goddess. But some of us are not just gambling away our food money, our leisure money, and our children’s clothes money. Some of us are gambling away other people’s jobs and we all must calm down, stop the threatening talk, stop the insults and try to help as many people find as many jobs as soon as possible. The Denim saga is a tsunami for little Malta. We all got together and cooperated to help outsiders. Why won’t we do this for ourselves?