Recently, in a casual conversation after a swim close to home, a man glanced around and in hushed tones shared an uninvited ‘fact’ with me. 

Since ‘Asian’ people have arrived in numbers in ‘England’, local people are getting poorer while ‘they’ are getting richer, he said.

This ‘fact’ was delivered as self-evident and unquestionable. 

Over the years I have become used to this trope and many related others.

Equally, I have become used to the refusal to offer any credible evidence for this view, entirely false as it is. Anyone wanting to explore the reality might begin (but not conclude) here, with the 2016 report on Healing a Divided Britain by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. But sadly, evidence is not relevant here.

What is striking about this most recent encounter is that this (Maltese) man felt comfortable (even obliged) to share his view with me, presumably because I am white (well, pink actually), most probably of Christian background and ‘western’. 

I very much doubt we would have had anything like the same conversation if I was wearing a thobe or had black skin. It is important that the ‘conversation’ is kept among assumed ‘like-minded’ white people.

But our discussion was never about England, it was about something more general and universal. It was about Ireland, Malta, the UK and US, Australia and beyond. It was about sharing a perception of loss, grievance, and vague anger even hostility, in this case expressed politely and with respect. 

Luckily, my confidante was not a hostile or bellicose person, just a regular ‘Joe’ who had absorbed a widespread myth. On other occasions (most notably at a BBQ with neighbours), the conversation has taken a much darker direction, one that suggested recourse to violence. The suggestion was met with silence by most of my neighbours.

Such exchanges are all about nurturing. Nurturing a vague sense of loss (often from an imagined ‘glorious’ or ‘secure’ past); a sense of general dissatisfaction and disadvantage, of vague loss of both influence and status. ‘We’ are now put upon by ‘them’.

Nurturing such a condition has deep roots at individual and social levels and is routinely weaponised by unscrupulous politicians, business, and cultural elites. It has been given renewed energy and focus in recent times by media and communications platforms, by social media ‘influencers’ and by culture warriors.    

Just as there needs to be a grievance, so too must there be a focus for that grievance. There must be someone responsible for our perceived loss; someone against whom we can project our frustration, anger, grievance and even hate.  Today, there is an extensive industry identifying such culprits.

Our perceived woes must be someone else’s fault. It is important to create an ‘Us and Them’ equation. 

‘They’ currently include Muslims, Black People (especially activists), ‘liberals’, feminists, the woke generation - the list is open ended and can be modified to suit different agendas and contexts.  Here in Malta, we have our very own list including migrants, ‘gone too far’ feminists, political ‘traitors’, independent journalists, interfering foreigners, faceless EU bureaucrats etc.

This agenda of grievance and loss is carefully and deliberately nurtured by some media (here state-controlled media) by populist politicians, corrupt business interests etc., and can be daily accessed on social media and in numerous everyday social encounters. 

This manufactured sense of disadvantage, loss and grievance is easily manipulated into anger, hostility and often violence much of it intense as evidenced in recent gun attacks in the US (and in the responses of the gun lobby). We have had our own local versions in the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia and the gunning down of Lassana Cisse and many of the responses to them. 

The moments across the range, from perceived or manufactured grievance and anger, to actual hostility and hate, to violence and murder, are not hard to grasp given the right circumstances.

Such hate doesn’t just happen; it is cultivated often carefully but routinely casually.

I’m reminded of the song lyrics from South Pacific by Rodgers and Hammerstein, written just after the Second World War. The song’s final lines are:

You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!

So when I reflect on the atrocity that has just occurred in Uvalde in Texas and on the inevitable demands that something should be done , I am immediately reminded of the many somethings that should be done here in Malta.