This seems to have been the week for a collective outbreak of cries of anguish and of anger.

There were stories that were on everybody’s lips but then there were also stories that were kept hidden, known only to those suffering under their pressure and thus all the more painful.

Not all the stories I am speaking about are known by the general public.

To start with the more obvious, the tragedy that led to the death of a young girl attracted immense and unacceptable public attention and a media that shot first and asked later.

So too happened with the arraignment of a man charged with the horrible acts of crucifixion of cats in Mosta, with the police gloating they had ‘solved’ the case and, again, the media going into over-drive condemning a person who has just been arraigned.

Beyond these two cases, there are innumerable others. I happened to tune in to one of Emy Bezzina’s long phone-ins on Smash and heard caller after caller claim they have not been given the justice they had hoped for under Labour after suffering what they claimed to be an injustice under PN.

I honestly never imagined that so many people felt the PN government had committed so many injustices. Maybe they did, for all I know. But I do know that in two areas, apart from the civil service, every promotion exercise in the army and the police created a tsunami of protests from those who claimed they had been passed over.

Maybe that is why the police have now been given such a top-heavy structure that ended up having more top brass than London’s Metropolitan Police, or so it was said. Maybe that wave of protests accounts for the many changes and forced exits there have been in the army.

Who is to say who is right and who is owed anything? Equally, it would also seem, every change causes its own wave of discontent and anger.

Going back to the Smash programme, the people I heard were livid with anger at the Muscat administration’s inability, so they said, at remedying their injustice and they promised retribution in the May EP vote.

Besides those I heard on Smash, I know of innumerable Labour supporters who wanted something and have been left without it. I do not know whether they deserve what they decided they must have, but I do know a little about the immense internal tussles inside Labour for more and more. And we on the outside think that more than enough has been done and more than enough have been promoted.

Each person feels most keenly what affects him or her, whether that is justifiable or not. Each person seems to want what others have and short of promoting everyone to all top grades, there seems to be no solution except to pull others down and force them out.

Someone has sent me a note about a person I know well, a person for whose moral high standards I can vouch, a person who is well-respected in the community in which he serves and has served with honour and ability.

This person had a high and very responsible post but he was arrested and kept in custody for 24 hours on an issue connected to his work. I would say that this was a trumped-up charge by a discontented client.

Nevertheless, this person and his family ended up suffering immense pain and deprivation as a result of this visit to Police HQ.

I am not at liberty to speak more, but it surely is a grave warning signal when the country turns on those who it should honour most and subjects them to arrest and interrogation maybe accused by a person with an axe to grind.

And lastly, I ask, why is a Maltese citizen, as Maltese as you and me, repeatedly the subject of an inexorable campaign against her by her former husband, a non-Maltese, who has successfully roped in the former president of a main party, an MEP candidate and successive journalists from one and the same paper all campaigning and bad-mouthing this Maltese woman for the simple reason that she has not accepted to grant her ex-husband the right to become a Maltese citizen when he is not legally due to become one?

 (At least, this time, the paper in question did not run the story in its online version, maybe because every time the story was run the comment pages were inundated by xenophobic comment)

These things and worse are happening around us and people, real people have their lives shattered and turned upside down maybe because of the cupidity of others, maybe through their own unreasonable cupidity.

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