We need systems that work

We live in a time of such contradictions that I sometimes wonder whether I’m hallucinating half of it. In the same few days the American president warned that “a whole civilisation will die tonight”, another group of Americans broke the record for the farthest humans have ever travelled away from Earth.

While the president spoke of decimating the oldest continuous nation in the world, the astronauts on the Artemis II were dedicating a crater to their commander’s wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020. How bewildering it is to see the best and the worst of humanity in two small boxes on top of each other on one of the apps that has come to control so much of our moods.

Locally, the mixed messages never stop either: in the same week that local media reported the government will be installing underground waste bins in 10 areas around Malta in a bid for a cleaner Malta, a woman was caught casually dumping a chest freezer in an illegal rubbish pile in Marsa. When I first looked at the stills, I couldn’t even reconcile what I was seeing with my country because it literally looked like I had come across photos taken in Cairo’s ‘Rubbish Village’.

Not only can I not believe that people would willingly do this to a place where others live, but in all honesty, if I had any governmental power at all, I would have sent a crew to clean things up, installed better cameras that can actually identify people’s faces and fined anyone who dared to perform such disgusting antics.

I feel like I’m screaming into an empty room which only dust and rot inhabit- Anna Marie Galea

It’s crazy to me that we are constantly shouting about attracting “higher-quality tourists” while letting significant parts of the country fall into wrack and ruin. And since we can’t apparently be trusted to act civilised, we have to enforce the laws that are there for this very reason. It’s genuinely disgraceful how some localities are treated on an island that covers only 316 square kilometres. 

The bottom line is, you can’t be talking about underground waste bins and then allow whole villages to become garbage dumps.

And while we are on the topic of the law and taking our time to apply it, I just wanted to issue everyone a gentle reminder that it’s been seven years since Lassana Cisse was murdered, and there has still been no justice. Is his family going to have to wait for an additional 11 years for any form of answer? You’d think that by now we would have learnt how evidence can get lost and how witnesses can either develop convenient memory loss or die when court cases take more than a handful of years to be settled.

But as usual, I feel like I’m screaming into an empty room which only dust and rot inhabit. Perhaps a justice system that works in a timely manner, that doesn’t further traumatise victims and their families, really is too much to ask for.

We don’t need more juxtapositions, monuments or politicians giving speeches. We need laws and systems that work.