As many sit and wait or analyse, recommend or vex, exploit or speculate on developments concerning Daphne Caruana Galizia and 17 Black investigations, I yearn to identify a person or entity with enough vision to speak of healing.
The country needs a task force that strategizes a long-term response programme to heal the wounds of the social fabric.
Many of these wounds have badly scarred or ooze a conflation of personal or family anecdotes and partisan stereotypes.
Wounds deeply rooted in the psyche include those experienced first-hand and the inherited family hand-downs.
A vicious cycle that often features wounded people front-lining crusades that smoke screen vested economic interest.
The absence of a national healing strategy galvanises the hurt and hatred in the collective conscience
The absence of a national healing strategy galvanises the hurt and hatred in the collective conscience passed on to the younger and future generations.
A dark legacy that to date has produced the bitterness in Daphne’s blogs, the reported carcades on the day she was killed and too many other episodes of violence.
In the light of recent developments concerning Caruana Galizia and 17 Black investigations, we can anticipate that some of the inferences and proposed explanations will be proved right and others wrong. Some will be satisfied, others will be, to say the least, disappointed. Whatever the outcomes, the episodes of violence impinge on the collective history.
After all, we live in a predominantly bi-partisan country – a characteristic that contributes to an ‘us and them’ mentality.
Compound this to the predominant Mediterranean culture where calm and cool are not exactly the cultural flagship.
Top up with the patronage and long-standing rifts that characterize Malta’s political history.
There is more than enough context to make a case for a national healing strategy to be a national priority.
Without it, we acquiesce the inevitability of culturally transmitted resentment.
While good-willed and valid contributions to present developments are essential, they are not enough.
I invite politicians, academics, technocrats, professionals, the clergy, NGOs and all those who feel the duty to stand up to be counted at this moment in the history of our country to work towards an aftermath that culls the lifeline of intergenerational political resentment.