There are many things which I am too young to have experienced but wish I would have been able to. One of them is witnessing Dom Mintoff speak at a rally while at the height of his power. Equally adored and reviled by many, I wonder what it would have been like to hear one of our most colourful historical characters speak about the country and the importance of us not letting our size dissuade us from taking control of our sovereignty.
During the last few days, as we continue to reach the pinnacle of our humiliation, I have often thought about how far the current Labour government has not only fallen from Socialist grace but from the very ideals which Mintoff so tirelessly campaigned for. I guess champagne is only bitter when you can’t afford to buy it yourself.
We started off the week being an international joke when our Minister for National Heritage, the Arts and Local Government decided to prove to the United Kingdom that we are the ill-bred peasants that many have always thought us to be and demanded that a gift that was given to a seven-year-old prince by Sir David Attenborough no less, be given back to us.
The offending item: a shark’s tooth that had been found on the island in the 1960s and which can be found for sale on eBay for the not so princely sum of $25.
If SOFA comes to pass, the results would be catastrophic- Anna Marie Galea
What made it even more laughable was the reference made to the importance of Maltese national heritage. Build roads over cart ruts, bury hypogeums and let paintings sit in mouldy buildings and no one bats an eyelid, but give something practically inane to the big, bad foreigner and the crowd goes wild. It’s apparently okay if we destroy our own national heritage as long as we are the ones doing it. No one has of course said that our own Natural History Museum looks like a Victorian mausoleum because the last time they were there, they were probably on a school outing in 1982. You can always trust us to have our priorities right.
Speaking of priorities, at the same time all this was going on, our government appears to have been somewhat happily willing to give our neutrality away to make up for the economic destruction that the previous prime minister and his band of merry brothers administered. I mean, I know that our new prime minister was always going to have to drink from a poisoned chalice, but must he really sell one of the only things which have stopped us from being everyone’s very public whore post-1979?
If SOFA comes to pass, the results would be catastrophic. Are we so ill-educated that we will object to a shark’s tooth being gifted but will not take to the streets to protest about our island’s neutrality and rule of law being taken from right under our noses? How can we justify another sovereign state’s citizens not being subject to the law of the land? Where are all those ‘proud Maltese’ who would punch you for looking at the flag the wrong way? Do you have nothing to say now? Maybe it’s high time you changed your mantra to “flus l-ewwel u qabel kollox”, to reflect the only thing you truly care about.
A country of clowns doesn’t even begin to cover what we have become and the worst part is that many of us don’t even know it yet. By the time people wake up, it’s going to be way too late. It’s already too late.