As Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby: “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly.” It’s a poignant statement and one born out of exhaustion, confusion and abject disbelief.
It encapsulates how it felt looking at my newsfeed on Wednesday evening and realising that the majority of our members of parliament, the same people we keep in power to lead and protect us, voted against allowing a public inquiry into the death of Jean Paul Sofia, who was killed when a building collapsed in December of last year.
As the videos started to leak of his outraged family screaming at our politicians from the balcony of the home of the heart of our democracy, I couldn’t understand how we got here. The theatricality of it all felt unreal. It was like I was watching a bad play. The grotesqueness of it all has stayed with me. Family members screeching for justice and physically and metaphorically looking down at the same people denying it to them, who, in turn, looked down in silence.
On Wednesday afternoon, 40 of our members of parliament kissed their partners and children goodbye, got into their fancy state-funded cars, sat down in an air-conditioned room and voted against the country finding out why a 20-year-old died in a disaster that should have never, ever happened.
Even now, I wonder if any of them questioned what they were doing. Not one abstention. Not one twinge of conscience. They stuck their bloodied knives into his memory, with his family looking on, with no shame. This is what is running our country. People who would clearly much rather make sure their place in the party is secure than campaign for a dead son.
It’s the arrogance of it all. The constant insult to intelligence. The papering over the truth. The lies which become truths broadcast on our state-funded stations. ONE even wrote that the Labour Party voted for justice. What justice? If you weren’t mad before living here, a few good years will take care of you.
To be made to feel like what has happened to you is nothing more than an inconvenient footnote in history must be the most excruciating thing on earth- Anna Marie Galea
Did our members of parliament think no one was going to ask who was being protected? Why these lengths to forbid an investigation that should have been so readily available? Did they think his mother was going to just go home and shut up? Has this country of milk and money become so drunk on its own corruption that people aren’t even bothering to hide injustice anymore?
To Jean Paul’s mother and father I say: my heart is with yours. There are still people out there who hope for you and pray that you receive the answers you deserve. It’s horrific enough to have to bury a child but to be made to feel like what has happened to you is nothing more than an inconvenient footnote in history must be the most excruciating thing on earth.
To everyone else, I say for the millionth time: how many deaths are enough for you to care about the state of the country? How many miscarriages of justice need to be made for you to be moved?
A black day indeed but, sadly, not an unexpected one.