Do your job

If there’s something I’ve learnt in my almost 40 years of being on this earth, it’s that there’s always a new layer of rock bottom that you can reach even when you think that things can’t possibly get worse.

On the same day that I watched a video of two groups of men throwing chairs at each other during yet another frenzied fight in Paceville with my mouth wide open and spent a full 45 minutes looking for parking in an area where I used to find parking in two, I had plenty of time to philosophise over how far we have fallen from grace as a country as I lay on my cold bedroom floor trying to get some respite when the electricity unceremoniously performed a vanishing act in the middle of the night.

I’m not going to lie; I am at my wit’s end.

Living in this country, especially during the summer, has become intolerable. It’s become so intolerable that even the gormless fools who vomit partisan party lines like they were sent a script by registered post aren’t pretending to be “positive” anymore. I’ve tried to find a proper equivalent in the English language for the phrase I am about to say but the Maltese one does it way more justice: pajjiż ta’ indannati or, rather, a country of damned people. And what indeed is sadder than being damned and knowing that you’ve done it to yourself?

I am at my wit’s end- Anna Marie Galea

We have had a traffic problem for decades; nothing has been done. The population has increased to unmanageable numbers and nothing is being done. Our construction industry has laid waste to our environment and space and, yet again, nothing is being done. And then we have the audacity to act surprised that our electricity can no longer catch up with our needs. I’m not trying to be callous here but what did everyone think was going to happen? We’ve been running up a tab on our country; did no one think they were going to have to pay?

The worst part is that most of this was avoidable. We knew there were too many cars on the roads; we knew that too many people were coming over; we knew that our spaces were being made smaller and smaller, and we have been having long power cuts for years.

So, I’ll ask again, why has nothing been done? None of this was unforeseeable. We have statistics, we have eyes, we have the lived experience of the thing going wrong.

What we don’t seem to have is ministers that are competent enough to lead us through the arid desert that they helped create. Then again, how can there be incentive for our people in power to grow when the majority of the country keeps getting kicked in the teeth and continues to dance like no one’s watching? The very definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

There are people in this country dying because of someone else’s incompetence. I don’t want or need apologies. Apologies mean nothing when your actions remain the same. I need my ministers to stop flouncing around like they’re at Marie Antoinette’s court, roll up their sleeves and create solutions. That is their one and only purpose. That is the only reason they exist.

I’m done with the smugness and the faux excuses that even a five-year-old would be able to see through.

Do your job.