If there’s something that I’ve never understood, it’s the way people cling to their national identities like Jack should have clung to the floating door in Titanic. They emigrate to faraway lands, don’t visit their country of origin for years on end and, somehow, every Sunday they still gather around their computers and watch the news on TVM.
Of course, it’s understandable that people get homesick but spending your life with one foot in one world and roundly refusing to remove the other from your memory of a land which no longer exists only leaves you stuck and unable to integrate with your actual reality. It also creates an ‘us vs them’ scenario, which can only lead to more trouble.
Given how many thousands of our fellow countrymen had to leave our islands for a better life just a few decades ago, you’d think that we would have a less dim view of all the people who end up on our rock. And, yet, a swift eyeballing of social media following the brawl in Ħamrun will show you that while we are very happy to populate other lands for our personal betterment, we are less than happy about people from other countries returning the favour.
It wasn’t just the direct racism that was breathtaking; it’s the backhanded, casual comments that really worry me. One person wrote that they were shocked when they went to London because they didn’t see any “blonde English people”. Apparently, Malta was asleep while the rest of the world was becoming increasingly globalised and has yet to grasp that the children of people who went to England from India in search of a better life 100 years ago are English. It seems to have completely escaped them that the frontrunner to be the next British prime minister is Rishi Sunak, who was born in Southampton in 1980 and is definitely not blond.
The authorities are doing precious little when it comes to helping people integrate
What we should all be concentrating on isn’t that people from different countries and cultures are landing here and staying (at this point, that is inevitable) but what is truly concerning is how the authorities are doing precious little when it comes to helping people integrate. And I haven’t even started talking about the thousands who are here irregularly and those whose asylum applications are taking years to be processed, which leads to further trauma and problematic behaviour borne out of frustration and despair.
If you’ve already fled a war-torn country, experienced torture, death and God knows what else, it shouldn’t take a huge stretch of imagination for people to realise that you’re not exactly going to be in tiptop condition mental health-wise.
I mean, truly, what is the plan here? Are we to just keep ignoring people who don’t have a Maltese passport and fill our jails with those who act out, instead of perhaps addressing issues at a grassroots level?
Are we supposed to applaud the advice given by major players in the PN camp telling us to send people home as if they were cattle?
Send them back to what home? To their deaths? Who leaves everything they have ever known with nothing but the clothes on their back if not because their home has become hell?
The writing is on the wall; stop pretending you can’t read it.