If there’s one thing that the BCRS machines have achieved, it’s the heightening of national rage. Watching people stand around the exhausted machines in the sweltering sun with sweat running down their backs, fronts and sides, clutching bags and bags of empty bottles with tense, white knuckles as one of the keepers of the machines kept repeating that they were broken, you could smell the barely suppressed violence in the air. I imagine this was how the beginning of the French Revolution must have felt. Only, sadly, we are not angry at our rich oppressors, just at each other.
This pathetic tableau reminded me of another pitiful situation I had witnessed a few days before. Sitting on one of our rocky beaches reading a book, it would have been easy for me to miss the lone, elderly man rifling through bins and checking crevices and sad, abandoned barbecue sites for bottles but when he started to pull out garbage from the overflowing cans and left it strewn out, instead of putting it back where he had found it, I was horrified.
Why would anyone willingly continue to dirty the environment while trying to make a quick few cents? Only on reflection did I realise that I had witnessed a perfect metaphor for the nation’s current state.
My great-aunt used to tell me that when Charlton Heston came to Malta, he reportedly called it a land of dust and flies; however, I’d like to do one better than him and call it a land of dust, flies and rubbish. And if you don’t believe me, take a look at the photo shared on social media of what looks like a mini landfill next to the Triton Fountain. It’s a pity that people don’t seem to have yet taken the time to zoom in on the contents of the pictured rubbish because they’d be down there in no time picking up the empty bottles while leaving all the drinks cups behind. After all, they can’t earn money from those.
Our country is falling apart bit by bit and we seem happy just to let it happen- Anna Marie Galea
We shout and beat our breasts vigorously while shrieking allegiance to the flag but it’s all for show. An elaborate charade to make ourselves look better than we are. It’s like claiming to love your baby but never changing their nappy. It’s like saying you’re house-proud and letting your dwelling place fall to rack and ruin. It’s like allowing your land to fall prey to amoral developers and letting your once pristine pockets of land fill with unused washing machines and doing nothing.
If you love something, you take care of it; you don’t let it rot. You protect it and don’t make it uglier. Then again, given the rate of domestic violence in this country, I wouldn’t be surprised if we weren’t able to agree on the definition of love, either.
Our country is falling apart bit by bit and we seem happy just to let it happen. It shouldn’t need to take money to motivate us to recycle and keep things clean. Where’s our sense of pride and the legendary bżulija or diligence that every romantic poet saw fit to ram down our throats? We probably lost that in some backdoor deal, too.