If there’s one thing I’ve always had trouble with it’s the way that Maltese people define national pride and what it means to be loyal. If we love something or someone, they can do simply no wrong, and should anyone suggest otherwise, we will stone them to death if need be.
So blind are we to objectivity that it doesn’t matter whether the object of our affections has lied, stolen or in some singularly lovely cases, killed. It’s the reason why so many of us have to suffer silently through others’ mediocrity and the reason why there is a culture of fear when it comes to openly criticising anything.
Even our idioms and sayings outline the consequences of not being meek and docile, with a great number of them directly or indirectly telling us: Say that something is wrong at your own peril. We don’t just get touchy about things; we get positively hormonal.
Of course, although many people will cite our Mediterranean temperaments as the cause for our passionate outbursts, our anger and indignation is not a blanket reaction for everything that doesn’t sound a hundred per cent kosher: we are pretty selective on what we completely lose our marbles over. Take social media interactions for example: if you share a photo of a starving child you might get two or three likes if you’re lucky, a post about construction may incite a little more rancour especially of late, and earn you about 20. One person with a foreign surname says that Malta is starting to look like a dump and your entire local network completely loses their minds.
When it happened recently, it was like watching feeding time at the alligator pit. Within two minutes of this poor, misguided soul posting about how Malta was turning into a massive building site, the post was inundated with angry, triggered locals baying for his blood and instructing him to go back to his country in the age-old way our little rock has become infamous for.
We don’t just get touchy about things; we get positively hormonal
It did not seem to occur to any of these people to see where this man was coming from and why he felt like making such a statement. Nor did it apparently occur to them to act their age and not their dress size. No, the country’s honour had been wounded by this ingratiate, and Mr Joe Borg from Santa Venera was going to light a fire like St Paul and challenge the snake to a throw-down. It was a bit like watching those teenage girls on Jeremy Kyle defending their obviously cheating, STD-ridden boyfriends: sweet but grossly unnecessary to the rest of us who aren’t wearing rose-coloured ski goggles.
It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that he may have been speaking from a place of objectivity, love and concern for his adopted country: he had broken the cardinal rule many of the Maltese live by, which is to never ever to air your dirty laundry in public, even if you’re being beaten to a pulp behind closed doors. Our collective silence has always been the greatest tool in our oppression both of ourselves as well as of the environment so many have shamelessly squandered. Our leaders have always relied on it and our misplaced sense of what it means to be loyal in order to be able to do what is best for themselves and we have only been too happy to accommodate.
Maybe next time you see a foreigner saying something about our island, you should question whether or not it’s actually true and then re-direct your anger to the right target. Pretty soon, there’s going to be no country left for you to go back to.