Like many with whom I talk these days, I find myself being at a significant loss politically. 

The political, social and cultural values I grew up with and which my lived experience confirmed are now under sustained attack. Those values are bewilderingly deemed as irrelevant or ‘woke’ (whatever that abusive term might mean) by large segments of society.

My own experience over the past five decades in places and contexts as diverse as Ireland, Rwanda, Ethiopia, South Africa, Australia and Malta has hardwired in me the fundamental importance of core human values. Values that are needed to even begin to lead a positive and ethical life.

Central to such a values framework are human dignity (for all, without exception), basic respect (for both rights and responsibilities), security (in its many dimensions), critical social, cultural and environmental awareness and a rejection of violence as a ‘first resort’ response. 

There are countless other values that could be enumerated. Together they make up the backbone of national and international cooperation and law, without which countries such as Ireland and Malta would be subject to the dictat and whim of the bully, armed or unarmed.

Without the extremely challenging struggle to realise these life-affirming values let alone to act upon them, it would have been impossible to realise the peace process in Northern Ireland. Or reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa or baseline civil rights in the US.  Or the vote for women in Malta.  Or ongoing challenges to officially sanctioned discrimination based on gender, race, disability or ethnicity. 

Without them, we would have no substantive basis to challenge the current (and past) presidencies in the US, in Russia or those currently killing in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, the DRC and else here.

Without them, we would be significantly weaker in challenging the breakfast, lunch and dinner criminality practised on an industrial scale by Malta’s economic and political elite.

When individuals, groups or students suggest to me that values and struggles such as those listed above are the preserve or preoccupation of liberals or lefties (or worse), I invite them to reflect on the fundamental importance of them in their own personal lives. To grow up without such values (or with their opposites) would be (and has been) existentially deforming.

To experience systematic discrimination or abuse as a young woman, as a Catholic (Muslim or Protestant), as black, as disabled, as gay or as being from the ‘wrong’ family or part of town) or indeed from the ‘wrong’ country is to suffer and struggle.

These values and value frameworks are not a liberal or lefty option – they are literally ‘life necessary’ for all of us, without exception.

And yet today, those values are under constant and sustained attack not just from political and economic demagogues but also from whole segments of our societies. 

The ‘big’ threats and attacks are easy to identify – Trump, Orban, Assad, Netanyahu, Modi, Putin, Lukashenko, Musk, Milai etc., the sickening, overwhelmingly male list goes on.  So too, their benefiting supporters and media networks alongside their unthinking followers.    

So too also those ‘big’ dispositions (or movements) such as misogyny (and its online influencers), racism (‘light’ and heavy), ethno-nationalism (tightly wrapped in ‘flag obsession’), revanchism (for lands or eras ‘lost’ in an imagined history), the created inequalities and exploitations and the ever-popular celebration of arms and militarism.

And in our increasingly desperate attempts to ignore and deny climate change, its causes and its consequences.

The threats to those life-protecting and affirming values are on full, technicolour view daily in the black hole that is all too often ‘social’ media.  It is as if social media is now deemed by a majority of users as a ‘values free’ world.  Feel what you want, think what you want, say what you want, imply and suggest what you want – all apparently free and without consequence. 

Except when it comes crashing through our own front door.

Malta, like my own native Ireland, is by no means immune to this apparent values- and consequence-free affliction. 

While many of us may currently be political orphans, history remains a long game.  We need to hold fast to our shared democratic values and practices, and we need to continue to challenge those who would undermine them. 

All is by no means lost – we have been here before.