We Really need to get a grip

Malta Independent Sunday, 16 October 2011, 00:00 Last update: about 16 years ago

I was talking on the telephone yesterday with a Maltese person who lives in London. He said how surreal it is when, in an environment where people are worried about their jobs, people are losing their jobs, and there’s talk of another recessionary dip, he logs onto the Maltese news sites to find that the biggest thing on people’s minds is... buses. And the main event is 30 people with scabies, which, apparently, constitutes a newsworthy “outbreak” and subsequent comments-board panic.

Right now, I’m feeling perversely that we need some real problems to get people to buck up and get a grip on themselves. You know, like wholesale lay-offs, homes being repossessed, 40 per cent unemployment among young people, businesses going down like skittles, and major cuts in education and health spending. That kind of thing, the kind that focuses people’s minds and gives them some perspective, and then maybe we won’t have to listen to the constant drone of low-level kvetching and the newspapers will get to tussle with some real stories and worthy headlines (scabies, for crying out loud).

People are so busy telling each other that the government should be taught a lesson – what lesson, how to run the economy and get its foreign policy right? – but all I can think of is that they could really do with a few lessons themselves. Like going home from the office after being made redundant, to find an eviction notice on their front door and a repossession order on what is no longer their house.

And I apologise for bringing this up again, but really with that girl who got up and yelled and stamped at the university because the buses are not to her liking, it’s not her language that should have upset people, but her attitude. I’ve never had much truck with over-indulged brats throwing tantrums in shops while dim-witted parents timidly hold out various treats only to have them rejected amid the screams and sulks. Yet that’s all I could think of when I watched the scene on video. I can tell you that I would have felt entirely differently had I known the girl in question had some major tuition fees loan hanging over her head, if she lived in a bedsit with another two people and €4 a day for food, if she spent her Sundays at the launderette. But I know she doesn’t, because this is Malta, and so that coloured my vision.

Maltese students are over-indulged in every possible way except the one that really counts – intellectual stimulation – and because of that they and others think it perfectly normal when one of them flings herself down on the floor and turns toddler-rigid over a bus.

When students rioted in London recently it was over tuition fees. That’s right – tuition fees. They pay to go to university, they pay to stay in lodgings, and they work nights to have money to live on. And in-between they do their laundry, their cooking and even occasionally scrub out the bathtub. To do all this, they take a student loan, which they have to pay back when they’ve graduated and got a job. Except that they can’t get a job, because there aren’t any.

In the United States, student debt – based on loans taken out to go to college – has reached $900 billion. Yes, $900 billion. This is more than what all US citizens put together owe on credit cards. Many students borrow $100,000 and even more to pay for their university education, and the law does not allow them to default on those loans by declaring bankruptcy. The debt is paid back over a 30-year period, which means that when their own children are ready to leave for college, they’re still paying off their student loans.

That, and not what we have here in Malta, is real life. I’m not for stripping away stipends and introducing tuition fees, because there’s too much ignorance already and we can’t afford to add to it. We know that people won’t pay for their education, that if they have to borrow money to go to university they just won’t bother, and that the main reason so many go to university in the first place is because they’re programmed to make the most of anything that’s free. If they learn anything while they’re at it, it’s bound to be better than what they didn’t know before.

So leave the stipends alone and don’t even think of tuition fees, at least not for some years until this place is a little more civilised. But I am for a better sense of perspective and for an end to tantrums and groaning, because if we’re not careful we’re going to find ourselves with something to really sob and wail about. And no, I don’t mean a Labour government. I mean real life. If we’re not careful, it’s going to hit us right between the eyes. And then we won’t be moaning about buses, that’s for sure.