We are living what can be described as a dictatorship in Malta. Nothing short of that.
As happens to people in many countries that face this fate, their reality is altered and their life becomes one of acceptance and obedience.
There is no need to define the meaning of dictatorship in our country. We see it around us in the destruction of our environment both urban and natural. We feel it in the language spoken even in our national parliament. We touch it when the trees in our church square are brutally torn from the ground, leaving the birds in a frenzy, in order to accommodate some other cement project which could be as unnecessary as a public toilet or as ugly as a block of apartments. We live it in our moral degradation hearing testimonies in court that should lead to arrests but that are just treated as spin and left to rot on the bed of lies of the government.
Anguish without expression has become the normal condition of people. That is a common state when humanity is subject to a dictatorship. We are expected to process corruption on a professional scale as though this is business as usual. We must ignore our concern when the virus is spreading like wild fire amongst us but protection measures are taboo and come too little and too late and are dressed as action when in fact they are the results of inaction.
Our lights must be switched on from the morning because of the sunlight now blocked by a neighbouring monstrosity. Our nerves must be coated in steel whilst we endure months or years of excavation, dust and disruption and try to home-school children or work from home while it is going on. Plants are covered in dust and breathing is difficult.
We turn our eyes away from the concrete, seeking some green landscape but see only cranes and blank party walls standing in fields and in narrow town and village streets. There is nowhere left to rest our eyes, except maybe the open sea.
A Prime Minister hears in evidence from a witness who has been granted state immunity that a Minister in his Cabinet was allegedly involved in a bank heist. His only response is that of a morally devoid person with no power and no integrity who only seeks to indulge in self-preservation against obvious evidence that cannot be dismissed. He makes up his own rules and expects the people to obey his opinion and follow without any opposition.
Unfortunately this lack of opposition is now endemic in the Maltese and Gozitan psyche. Morals have been compromised and fear ingrained in ordinary people who give up and turn their glance and their ears away from such indigestible diatribe. The opposition party itself behaves like it is afraid of its own shadow and fails to stand up for its values.
What it takes, though, is one youth, one wife who has lost her loved one due to impunity or lack of protection from the authorities, one of the public who has some courage in them, to take a half dozen eggs and throw them in the face of injustice.
Those who are full of pride and say so at every chance they have will not like to have egg on their face.
It is a case of David and Goliath. One small shepherd was able to knock down a giant with one small stone flung from a sling.
One egg can say it all. Six can say it better. A carton would make it clear that we are not going to stand for this regime of hypocrisy, of double standards and of deception.
Is this corruption, this system of serving the powerful and the masochistic what we want the next generation to grow up believing? It is not enough to leave the young to derive distraction from drugs and alcohol. If they continue to shield their mind from the truth and turn to materialism and lack of responsibility as a normal condition they will lose every meaning of life and lose their purpose.
It is true, our spirit is violently beaten by the ugly construction around us, by the continuous theft of our land and heritage, by the trampling of nature and the creatures that are there to make us happy and we are left in a state of apathy. That makes us fertile ground to resign ourselves to the kind of dictatorship that we don't even realize we are living.
The mentality, used a defence by Keith Schembri in his Facebook post of Thursday, that under a Nationalist government a working class family was not expected to rise in society or business is simply a false concept. It was, in fact, under Labour that our University was gutted and working public school students were given an advantage over private schools, with degrees reduced to nothing more than a job. That all changed under Dr Fenech Adami's government with the University opening up equally to all students of whatever education or background provided that met the entry requirements.
It was also under a Nationalist government that Robert Abela's father was made President of Malta.
Carrying the card of reverse snobbery, does not give Labour licence to plunder and walk over the institutions and proper order in the running and management of the country. It does not mean since it became Malta Taghna Llkoll that it became the domain of one Yorgen Fenech and his lapdogs.
The success enjoyed by entrepreneurs is found on any political side. Indeed, many who were previously of a blue leaning, clearly turned red (or light blue) at the 2013 election and found that their bread was buttered even better under Joseph Muscat, provided they were willing to turn their eyes away from corruption and the price of gaining access to the 4th floor and all the whistles and bells.
It is this mentality, the one they like to think of as "positive discrimination" towards justifying policies such as the contentious Annex 2 in policy DC2015, well explained by Perit Alex Torpiano in the article in The Times of 18th March, responsible for the tall buildings cropping up like weeds amongst the wheat, which has brought us to this sorry state and the kind of animalistic urge to walk over the common good for personal wealth creation.
Prime Minister, Labour are guilty. No "jiena kburi" is going to change that. If you really are proud of what you do, then explain to the public why exactly Annex 2 in policy DC2015 is the best of what Labour has done for the country. And whilst you are at it, why not reveal that pesky Minister who apparently, allegedly, has something to do with a bank robbery? Why hide what makes you proud?