Tourists in Malta

Eddy Privitera is right in what he said about tourists’ complimentary comments about the island (May 27) because tourists come for a good time and see only the obvious deficiencies: bumpy roads when driving around and nothing but cranes and half-finished buildings, including hotels. 

However, the “few Maltese and British opinionists with a political agenda” that he refers to are not only talking about building sites and bumpy roads but also about widespread corruption in high places, technology and infrastructure stuck in the 1960s, queues outside banks and in hospitals, filthy caravan sites and widespread bureaucracy in every department. 

I’m Maltese and, like other tourists, I visit Malta as a tourist and stay at the Grand Excelsior. I rent a car and eat in the best restaurants. I sit by the big pools on comfy sunbeds and occasionally take a dip, sipping on gin and tonics in between.  

Like other tourists who he speaks to, the rest of life on the island would be a mystery, except that I also speak to my family and friends and other locals in pubs who are not tourists. That’s where you get the facts from, Eddy, not on TV news channels run by political parties.

Unlike obvious fanatics like Privitera, tourists are not interested in, and know nothing about, Maltese politics. Tourists, like everywhere else they go to, only see the good bits. 

Indeed, I echo the same comments tourists make in Malta when we visit places like Mexico and Brazil - beautiful beaches and luxurious hotels and clubs - but we only see the downside when we return home and watch documentaries on TV.

“Political agenda”? Let’s not be gullible, Eddy!

Paul Brincau – Uxbridge, UK

What’s the purpose of life?

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has referred to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a ‘holy act’.

Further to Alan Cooke’s recent response to Jacqueline Calleja’s claim that the tragedies of wars are all man’s fault and related to his ‘original sin’, I would add that the referral by Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Krill to the devastation and war criminal events in Ukraine as a “holy act” (also happened during the Crusades and the Roman Church’s burning of Jews and ‘heretics’ at the stake), calls into serious doubt these prelates’ claim that they have been appointed by an ‘all loving God’ and that they are ‘His representatives’ on this planet. 

The seriousness of the harm done to religious belief by these contradictory and boastful claims (and also by the deplorable sexual abuse of minors ascribed to some clergy worldwide) has probably not been fully appreciated. Too often, attempts to minimise this devastating harm to the credibility of the priesthood have relied on blaming only a few ‘bad apples’, the work of the ‘devil’ or man’s ‘original sin’.

The misogynous ‘fairy tale of Eve’s original sin’, which ‘condemned humanity to disease and death’, sounds very much like the work of macho men who put together the Jewish Bible and was later adopted by the Christian movement. 

Homo sapiens is not only the most intelligent animal, he is also the most arrogant and belligerent. He claims he’s the only animal vested with an ‘after-life’. Some of his tribes claim God as their own – the Jews claim they are supposed to be His ‘chosen people’ and the Roman Catholics (as John Azzopardi reminds us, May 14) regard ‘heaven’ as their ‘exclusive reward’. China’s Confucius’s advice to his atheist compatriots, on how to live a good life, was simply “not to do to others what you don’t wish others to do to you” – one commandment and as good as a whole bunch of others.

When you look around you, if you have enough insight to observe and query, you may come to terms with the reality that Mother Nature has no special respect for homo sapiens. He has to endure natural disasters, crippling and distressing disease and, finally, death, sometimes even in infancy or childhood. 

The stark reality is that man is not really very different from a leaf, which is born in spring, flourishes in summer and withers and dies in the autumn, returning to dust to replenish the soil. If he hasn’t striven to leave this earth a little better than he found it, his life has essentially been a ‘zero’  and if he’s been predominantly hypocritical, fraudulent, corrupt and generally bad to others, his life has registered a minus to the common good. 

Some ask, what’s the purpose of life. There you have it in simple terms. It’s too easy to fall for complicated wishful thinking fairy tales when one has exaggerated grandiose ideas of our place in the universe. 

Albert Cilia-Vincenti – Attard

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