Today is a national holiday. We know it as the day to commemorate the dead of Sette Giugno – the bloody culmination of days of rioting where four men, Manwel Attard, Guze Bajjada, Lorenzo Dyer and Carmelo Delia, lost their lives to British troops.

Attard, Bajjada and Dyer lost their lives in confrontations with hopelessly small numbers of British troops. People argue over who started what, but the fact is that three men were shot and one was run through with a bayonet a day later. The year was 1919, and popular culture tells us that the riots were about the price of bread and the profits that millers, bakers and importers were making at the expense of the Maltese workers. But it goes much deeper. The purpose is not to analyse what went wrong at the time, or to give an analysis of the event in the context of history, but rather to compare things then to how they are now.

The event has to be seen in the context of wages not keeping up with skyrocketing prices. Maltese workers were underpaid and being asked to pay over the odds for staple goods. At the same time, there was political strife in trying to get the Maltese people a deal from the Empire whereby they could exercise self determination – at least in matters local.

But what it boiled down to was people protesting in the streets because they believed that they were truly being deprived of bread – the most consumed product at the time. People gathered, and they became violent – smashing up shops, newspaper offices, colonial offices and pretty much everything they could get their hands on. The protesting workers became a mob. What would happen today? Malta has seen its fair share of protests, but even things which we feel about passionately – the water and electricity bills for example – can no longer rouse the rabble as they used to in the past.

We do not mean ‘rabble’ to be directed to any sector of the public – we mean it purely in grammatical terms – in the sense of disgruntled people taking up arms and becoming violent. Thankfully, those days have passed, but in a sense – the mere fact that the people (as a collective) do not feel and act as they used to in times gone by is a testament to our democracy.

But there is a counter argument. Some might argue that the same fact points towards the erosion of democracy – in the sense that people do not feel as if it would be able to bring enough pressure to bear on a government to get things done by people power.

If we look around the world as we see it today – we will see that if pushed hard enough, the mob will always resurface and this has been a constant since antiquity. The people of Rome rose up on many an occasion, as did the French in the revolution and, in more recent memory, we saw several uprisings in Communist Eastern Europe.

The truth is that Malta is going through a phase where things are not grand. We have it better than most in the rest of Europe, but the world is what it is. We have dropped into a period of uncertainty and the world will never be the same again. But that means changing our lifestyles. We do not expect people to take to the streets and smash shops and offices because bills are too high. Of course, no one is saying that there is any talk of this happening. But we hasten to point out that the situation we are in today is a collective one. We are all in the same boat. In 2010, almost 100 years after the bread riots, our maturity as a people has got to the point where we can make sacrifices and we can work together to dig ourselves out of a hole. But, and this is the important thing to bear in mind, any government must always know how close its people is to breaking point. Failure to do so will simply incite the mob. Athens is proof enough.