I am an Arsenal supporter. My political allegiance over the years has oscillated between the palest of pinks to the palest of blues. I am not remotely formally religious but acknowledge my culture to be Catholic. I live in the north, but also love the south of these islands. My first language is English. I am Maltese but consider that to be a description, rather than a mark of anything better or worse than anyone else. I went to university but consider education to be a lifelong experience.
I prefer a mind-blowing chat which can change my way of thinking to the most delicious of meals, but that is undoubtedly because I live in a part of the world where hunger is not the norm. I am pro life but pro choice in certain situations. I am just one of 400,000 very ordinary people who live here, with a mix of views, sympathies and dislikes which make me me, just like you reading this have your own set of values, beliefs, preferences, habits.
We are one nation, mostly shades of brown cum beige cum grey to look at, mostly Catholic, mostly house-proud, mostly passionate about food, and hence mostly a little overweight. In general, we are very very similar to each other; in the detail we are vastly different. And yet the majority, whether they are red or blue, environmentalists or contractors, working women or not, home owners or tenants, well off or not, totally corrupt or dishonest or not, or shades of in between, share one unfortunate characteristic in common. We define our rightness and our goodness through superiority in some form or other over others, not through ourselves at all. Our hypocrisy was, is and will continue to be our downfall.
Dr Gonzi, Dr Sant or anyone else can talk of new ways of doing things, another vision, a third or fourth way. Yet on their own, without our feeling that we are truly one people, without just liking ourselves and respecting each other, whether we are red, blue, religious, liberal or whatever, we can't possibly make anything better. If we continue to divide and self destruct by class, political belief, band club allegiance, by Gozo or Malta, we will get nowhere, or get somewhere so slowly that the boat will always be missed. We have in fact become incredibly well off too quickly, and in some cases without working too hard for it. Hence the only people we seem to admire today are those who can make, are making, or have made a lot of money. Our god is Mammon.
Our children, a generation spoilt by instant gratification, have to somehow undo the bad habits they have learnt, and assume some new values to be passionate about if they are to have any hope of having a decent island to live in and bring up their own families in, one day too.
Everywhere people are hiding in their retreats, and not really talking to or feeling part of the whole nation. We are the tiniest of countries and it is not impossible to listen to everyone, and to respect everyone. Some are learning to relax only by snorting coke, which is becoming as mainstream in certain classes as beer and fags are in others. Some join religious groups and console themselves there, while the lives they lead are disproportionately different to the values they hold dear when they are with others like them. Some have just embraced promiscuity. Some get into causes like the environment or animals, or keeping too many immigrants from getting in, ostensibly to try and fight for a better Malta for their kids, but behave in the same negative and blinkered way the rest of the country behaves, always pointing fingers and never ever looking within, rubbishing anyone who is a politician, a member of the business class in general and the building industry in particular, or anyone who they consider the enemy. Unless of course they have any sort of connection, business or familial with them! Others retreat into our partisan and always subjective media, where some are destroyed while others get off scot-free, because they have some business or familial connection with the board, the editors, the party or whatever.
The utter lack of fairness and meritocracy here has made most of us retreat into our klikka, our cause, our families. No wonder the sense of community is so weak and only surfaces at Eurovision of all things!
To try to be balanced you have to look at it all, snort a huge pinch of salt, take a deep breath and think very very hard!
It has been unduly hot since May and maybe this partly explains the explosion of bad behaviour of late, but we don't have a history of hating each other, as do the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. We don't have to endure a resurgent Taliban who recently shot schoolteachers in front of their classes of traumatised children in the South of Afghanistan for the crime of teaching girls (!), or even those monsters in Iraq who took Shiite schoolchildren off a bus, lined them up and shot them dead.
And yet we are angry. Our most beautiful MP Justyne Caruana lost her usual cool and defended her “family”. She might have felt hassled. I know the feeling of being harassed very well, and it could be me or you losing it in a certain situation. Minister Gatt threatened a Super 1 cameraman with imprisonment (again we don't know what provoked that), an opinion writer allegedly called a contractor a drug baron, a contractor lost his cool and ran after her and allegedly pushed or slapped her.
And this is just what gets into the media. I heard a taxi driver attack an English tourist and his young son in front of the Phoenicia Hotel when he remarked that it was wrong for a taxi to be parked on a pavement. I saw and heard Malta’s “cat man” sitting opposite Joinwell in Sliema abusing a disabled tourist in a wheelchair who didn't give him money for his blessed cats by retorting “That’s why God made you disabled.”
Never have I felt so ashamed to be Maltese. And the nerve, invoking God to be cruel, as people do all over the world with the most devastating of consequences. No wonder I like football, and don't hate any supporters of any other team or any other team. You can't have fun with so much hate in your heart.