Our vulnerability is being lost in translation. Keeping the feel good factor high is important .

It is  important to keep minds and bodies going, to fuel ambition, fire motivation to achieve a state of even higher 'feel good ' state , often mistakenly imagined to be something akin to the pumped up  glamorous lifestyles of some of the  TV celebrities constantly present in the  lives of many big and small screen enthusiasts.

Feel good factor is important , even in its spun abstract form .

It is important for people to  have something to fall back on , especially when they have that   stubbornly recurring, fleeting, sinking,  realisation that that blinding bright light is synthetic, a mere mirage,  a lie.

If the feel good factor level is kept high enough for long enough, from one kitchen show to the next arresting headlines, or lovely  statistic, the crucial majority of people will be empowered to  quash  nagging unwelcome doubts, keep grinding at the grindstone, consuming and existing,  existing and consuming , like my hamster on his spinning wheel in his lovely cage.

But the creation and maintenance of feel good factor is a very delicate matter. If not enough of it is created at the right time, in the right dose, for the right mindset (because there are different mindsets to cater for at any given moment), general confidence will sag, the treadmill slows down and people will acquire unsavoury time to taste what they eat and listen to what they hear . 

If on the other hand, this blessed feel good factor exceeds its crucial dose, it quickly mutates into the dreaded 'feeling duped'  factor, which in turn  swiftly transforms trust in 'a thing ' into incredulous disgust with the very same 'thing', all this change occurring within  the negligible time it takes for a sodium ion to float across a grey cell membrane. 

That incredulous disgust at discovering and acknowledging deceit, does not remain disgust. It becomes blanket doubt on everything and anything emanating from the same source of the original , more recently unmasked deceit.

Our PL government, a celebrated master of marketing and spin even more than its trainer and predecessor, recently found itself in such a quandary by yet another unfortunate mistake of its communications arm.

What should have been a New Year's address that sustains our joie du vivre at least till Carnival, threw us all into the sticky black pit of coming face to face with our own vulnerability as individuals and as a nation.

We are all being fooled, beyond any reasonable doubt, but it had to be an unfortunate kitchen comedy to make us accept the fact that with this government what you see is anything BUT what you get.

What at face value was looking pretty like the sustained BBB rating our country got from Standard and Poor’s, suddenly demanded deeper thought.

And deeper thought is dangerous as we have discovered at our own risk to sanity.

And deeper thought leads to deeper questioning , the answers to which might jeopardise our sanity further.

But let me stick to S&P, (which incidentally was sued by the US government not so long ago for a mistake involving a couple of trillions). I will do this without mentioning the glaring P word which is also shocking and not in the statistic.

So , What does a good Standard and Poor  rating  that achieve, when for those numbers our citizenship has been sold, residence and visa permits have been issued like pastizzi at is-Serkin on Sunday morning, institutions have been rendered useless in the name of slashing bureaucracy, national assets are being systematically disposed of through contracts we never get to see, our little remaining countryside  is being sold off, our environment is succumbing to legal and illegal pillaging and our security has been rendered a glaring question mark? 

There are many countries with GDP levels much better than ours, the public debt of which even actually decreases when the economy does very well, that are still not fit for my dog to live in. ( and I’m not talking about Thailand or Vietnam).

A good economy is important but it is not translating into a reduced vulnerability of our nation to internal or external undermining of our standard of living or way of life. 

Never have I felt the Rule of Law in my country threatened to this extent, with multiple scandals going unchallenged, three deaths in a row of people while in custody, openly corrupt people protected by the government and rewarded with positions carrying much responsibility, our international security in a quandary and so on. Never has the air been so heavy, the space so suffocating. 

This government is a wizard at marketing which in itself is harmless if not used deliberately to harm or to conceal harm. But marketing is not enough. It needs substance, substance to protect its people, especially the most vulnerable.  

For the increasing vulnerability of the nation on many levels, both internally and internationally might be lost in translating the good economic figures, but losing it in translation does not mean it's not there or that it is being addressed. 

It is up to us, the people, to keep showing our government that we insist that our country and our people are kept safe in a standard and way of life that  our forefathers made possible by their toil, and which we want to make possible for our children. We can no longer rely on our Government to deliver on our trust without our constant participation, because that delivery has not been forthcoming in the direction we envisaged.  

The kitchen thing was just a wakeup call. It’s all up to us now.