Visitors to Malta and those who live abroad and follow what happens here never fail to be impressed by a quality that is to be found in abundance among the Maltese – the way they adapt to circumstances.

We can see this in great and in small things.

Take traffic, for example: the Maltese roads are becoming ever-more clogged roads due to the enormous amount of cars and the narrow roads. Traffic jams and tail-backs are the order of the day.

But the Maltese are learning to adapt – witness the increasing number of Maltese on motorbikes. And the increase in accidents involving motorbikes on traffic-clogged roads.

Take personal lives. When marriages began to suffer under the different conditions of modern way of life, the Maltese adapted, late perhaps, but they adapted. The introduction of divorce has greatly helped minimize the hard conditions of past years for those families which had split apart and which often seemed without a solution.

So too as regards work opportunities. There was a time, many years ago, when Malta looked at its own future with dread, seeing limitless threats and few opportunities. Today we have come to realize the opportunities are limitless and the threats few. The Maltese, well, many of them, have adapted to the new style of life as if they had never lived otherwise.

All this has taken place with the minimum of fuss and disruption. Malta attained independence without the bloodshed that accompanied that stage in the life of other countries. It has seen governments come and go as if that was the most natural evolution. It has seen a country based on religion give way to a post-Catholic country with no lacerations at all.

But then there is a downside to all this adaptability.

In many cases, not just the ones we mentioned earlier, adaptability followed most times the easy way out instead of seeking the proper solution to the problems.

Take traffic, an easy subject to observe, given one is forced to sit and wait in the innumerable tailbacks in our country. Switching to a motorbike may not be possible or advisable for all people and having a motorbike exposes one to the bad driving that has become endemic – the savage way people tend to cut across, the hogging of the outside lane, the exasperated pushing on the tailend of the car in front, etc.

The proper solution would be proper roads, which one cannot say the Malta roads are an example of that, and proper no nonsense policing. As happens in other countries. And proper road markings. As happens in other countries. Is it so difficult?

In other words, the fact that the Maltese adapt easily should not mean that one leaves things to deteriorate and does nothing strategic to correct them. On the contrary, the fact the Maltese can and do adapt does not exonerate those whose duty is to guide the country from the hard work to come up with the proper solutions.

The Maltese, then, are lucky. When it was clear the political parties were shying away from tackling the issue of broken marriages and the introduction of divorce, somebody (or rather somebodies) came up and solved the problem for them.

But we cannot always count on being so lucky. There may be a time when we will come to regret not taking the proper way to tackle the problem and can only sit and see the problem becoming intractable.