Probably the only good thing that has come out of this pandemic is that it really has brought out people’s true colours. It is a pity most of those colours seem to be varying shades of beige. For what could be beiger than literally not caring about any cause unless it directly affects you?
It has been a long, hard bone of contention for me to chew on, but it never fails to disappoint me just how little people care about things they cannot relate to and how empathy needs to be forced like toothpaste from a rusty, used-up tube at the best of times.
Just last week, as more pandemic measures were introduced to the sound of a French goat in a beret bleating “too little, too late”, I was shocked to see a distraught, pregnant mother-to-be who I don’t know from Adam get into an argument with a group of people who clearly missed their slot when the great eye in the sky was handing out the compassion coupons.
Obviously scared at having to face the prospect of giving birth alone, she wrote a few lines to indicate how fed up she was that people were still being allowed to meet in each other’s homes whereas she was probably going to be deprived of the support she needed from her husband at the most vulnerable point of her life thus far. You did not have to be a mother to see her point, and yet comment after comment indicated that many did not care and were not bothered with you knowing that they did not care. It really does make you thankful that there are laws in place to deter people from killing each other.
I do not know when we became so carefully curled up in callousness or if we’ve always been this way, but our rising numbers are turning out to be a masterclass in showing the world what happens when a community refuses to follow rules and has leaders who practically encourage it not to, by playing things down when they should not and not cracking down hard enough when they should.
The cracks caused by those who do not care versus those who do are going to take a long time to heal- Anna Marie Galea
Don’t care – Anna MariIt is little wonder that the first line that any foreigner learns when they arrive to our shores is “U iva, mhux xorta”. It is this one line that adequately sums up why we seem genetically unable to queue, endemically inept at taking criticism and being objective, and wholly incapable of putting anything above making an extra buck.
The “u iva, mhux xorta” syndrome permeates our very bones and leaves very little room for anything as expansive as caring about our neighbour. Hell, if last weekend’s tombola hall event populated by the older more vulnerable generation is anything to go by, some of us do not even care about ourselves.
In the coming days, we will be reaping what we have spent a year sowing and no amount of press conferences, extra intensive care units, and tears are going to change that. I would like to think that we will learn something from this, but I suspect that in a nation already defined by deep and scarring divisions, the cracks caused by those who do not care versus those who do are going to take a long time to heal.
Listen to people in the healthcare sector and do your best to protect yourself and your family, help our sagging hospitals by trying to stay out of them. We did start running like the prime minister foretold we would; running out of time.