Don’t be so sour

One Sunday morning, Arnold Cassola posted a Facebook video of music blaring out of the upper floors of Mercury Tower in Paceville. It was the third consecutive night that residents of Swieqi, St Julian’s, Pembroke and Upper Gardens had been kept awake until 2 am.

The first hostile reply arrived within half an hour. It said nothing about the noise, mind you. “You hate the prime minister so much,” it read. “You never tire of throwing mud at him. This is all envy.”

Here, a man complains that thousands of people are unable to sleep. The reply tells him what is wrong with him instead.

You can swap Cassola’s name for anyone else’s and the thread will almost certainly read the same. Under every resident’s post about construction dust or overdevelopment, every letter about a beach turned into a lido, every video of a party booming its speakers, the same replies queue up as if issued from a script.

Live and let live, tkunx indannat (don’t be such a misery), dejjem jeqred (always complaining), “what did you expect, living next to Paceville?”

By now, you will realise that the grievance is never engaged. Instead, the griever is.

“Live and let live” is always a seductive retort because it is half right. What people wear or whom they love is certainly none of our business and Malta is better for having slowly learned that.

But noise at 2 am is not a private choice. It is lived by everyone within earshot, which this summer means everyone within 700 metres of Noma Island, the floating beach club that France turned away as incompatible with protecting the sea and that Malta licensed. The Malta Ranger Unit reported it four times in a single evening; Transport Malta replied that it had no assets available at sea.

When liberty will not stretch, history is summoned instead. Numero Uno and Gianpula have been loud for decades, one commenter reminded Cassola, so what is there to complain about?

But “it has always been that way” and “insejtu żmienkom” (you forgot your own time) are not memories. They are, simply, a blatant surrender. Where was Mercury Tower a decade ago? There was nothing 122 metres tall to broadcast a DJ set from. And even where the nuisance is genuinely old, precedent is not permission. We accept “we’ve always done it this way” from nobody else.

So, when neither liberty nor history will do the job, what remains is the person: sour, jealous, dejjem jeqred.

Residents are expected to settle for mediocrity so that success can be measured in luxury- Nicholas Borg

It would be comforting to dismiss this as mere comment-section behaviour but the people at the very top talk the same way. When Moviment Graffitti carried residents’ anguish into planning hearings, the environment minister answered that extremism gets you nowhere. Repubblika, in the home affairs minister’s words, is an extremist faction of the PN; and journalists asking difficult questions found themselves branded part of “the establishment” by the prime minister, in language the Institute of Maltese Journalists said painted critics as enemies of the state.

The comment sections did not invent the insult; they are simply repeating it after their betters.

Cassola’s answer was to publish a ledger. Dejjem jeqred, he wrote of himself, but results are obtained. He can afford the joke because the record keeps siding with the moaners.

It took 29,041 signatures, initially dismissed as populism, and countless protests by the same indannati to return Manoel Island to the public. It took stubborn objectors in Swieqi to have the 10-storey Halland project permit revoked in court. Almost every improvement this country has made in recent years began with someone being told to stop complaining.

The strangest part is that the complainers are asking for exactly what they were promised. This government campaigned on replacing GDP with wellbeing as the measure of national success and pledged to raise our quality of life by a quarter.

Then the prime minister measured our success in new boats, new cars and foreign holidays and told us that whoever wants them must accept they bring new realities with them.

The word wellbeing did not come up once. Residents, it seems, are expected to settle for mediocrity so that success can be measured in luxury.

One commenter under Cassola’s video answered him better than any economist could: that luxury is a peaceful, accessible beach next to your home. That a boat should be an option, not the only way left to rest.

So, the next time somebody complains about the music, the cranes, the traffic, notice your first instinct. If it is to ask what is wrong with them, rather than what is wrong, the reflex has you too.

And, yet, the moaners keep being right. That should worry us far more than the moaning.

Nicholas Borg is a data engineer and writer based in Malta.