It feels like it’s been the longest January in recent history. Between a potential world war being started, the spread of the coronavirus and Brexit finally happening, you would be forgiven for thinking that 2020 was a harassed mother of four children trying to fit a week’s worth of errands into one day.
Not ones to be outdone, (after all, we are the best in the world), our little country has had more ups and downs this week than a stripper working a pole in the busier part of Las Vegas.
Our old friend Konrad Mizzi was offered an €80,000 a year contract which was cancelled quicker than me helping myself to some doughnuts at the village feast, Keith Schembri has done the next leg in his world tour (I think we are all starting to believe that he plans to pursue a career as Beyoncé’s back-up dancer), former police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar has been appointed as a consultant on public safety and logistics to the Home Affairs Ministry and received a performance bonus for how effective he’s been in the past three years and Clint Camilleri, a self-professed hunter, was given the responsibility of The Wild Birds Regulation Unit.
It’s high time that we opened our eyes and ears and attempted to try to expand our minds beyond our back gardens
I would laugh if I weren’t choking on the bitter, bitter irony and dark, twisted humour the powers that be seem to have.
Throughout all this topsy-turviness, Daphne Caruana Galizia’s makeshift memorial has been vandalised. I’ve never known someone who is no longer with us to be able to cause such consternation: proof once again that, given half a chance, our charming brethren will always focus on precisely the wrong thing.
A quick sweep of social media reveals the badly constructed bleatings of a people who apparently don’t have an issue with our taxes being siphoned off to fatten the pockets of the people they voted for but who arelosing their marbles over a memorial. Priorities.
And while we are at it, freedom of speech is defined as the right to express opinions without censorship or restraint, but I’m pretty sure that even the guy at the back of the class with one brain cell not taking notes knows that wishing someone dead is not that.
It’s high time that we opened our eyes and ears and attempted to try to expand our minds beyond our back gardens.
With every passing day, we are losing more opportunities to do the right thing and rebuild a democracy and rule of law that has all but collapsed to become a free-for-all.
Your country is not asking for much: all you need to do is care.