Today a friend told me he was in a particularly funny mood – he sent me a meme of our ex university classmate on his daily jog with a caption ‘Me on my way to Dingli to save 300 year old carob trees and ODZ land’. I replied with a tearful emoji. We exchanged another few words and I started running through newspaper headlines. Snippets of very sad stories woven together in a tragic melodrama evoking, if not the most hysterical of laughter, the most bileful suffocation which I could not hold back from crystallising in writing.
So while Aaron is busy jogging, and a few of us are, for the umpteenth time attempting to defend our so vulnerable green friends, his buddy Miriam Dalli clad in bright red attire cheerfully invites startups to “discover Malta as a place to do business but also as your new home”. Unsurprisingly, the clip gives no essential information on why these start ups should consider this tiny Mediterrean jewel so strongly as their home but simply shows more of the same superyachts and blue sea.
Please do note I mention the the deep blue sea, not the shores which are increasingly targeted as opportunities for the most unnecessary and dismal jetties for the usual circle of friends to pollute our seas and lungs further for their unsatiable and ludicrous greed. Our shores, are slowly turning as unsightly as our streets. Never enough steel and posters forcefeeding us the most futile motivations for having to breathe in dust and withstand never ending diversions and unnecessary traffic, oh yes, that which we were promised would decrease.
Meanwhile, as the case for the horrific murder of a journalist, continues, 3.5 years down the line, amidst numerous scandals and abundant pardon requests, the lawyer who currently stands accused of attempted bribery of a journalist, resumes his case for the defence of his clients. Whilst the EU Commissioner harps about ‘Daphne still working for us and for the truth’, in a court case of absolute national interest we still see bans on names so as ‘not to put people in danger’.
God forbid anyone be in danger! Let’s just let the danger engulf us all like wildfire as this silencing of a nation seeps into our national identity like the most acceptable and natural way of being. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the picture of our Malta as it emerges from today’s headlines. Let us, the silenced nation, sit and stare and bear the shame.