I think that the first truth we learnt as soon as we could talk is that the nursery rhyme ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me’ is a big fat lie.

How many toddlers do you know brandishing sticks or throwing stones in the playground unless you are David training for your meeting with that philistine Goliath?

But as soon as we could talk, we learnt the value of words, what they can do. How they can hurt. How our words trigger a response from others depending on what we would like to achieve. More often than not, we remember what people told us or said about us, more than what they did to us. 

Two weeks ago, President George Vella announced a conference about national unity because “people are sick and tired of fighting in society”.

With the rise of social media, national political and civil discourse in Malta has been marred by what Barack Obama called recently, though not original to him, as ‘Truth Decay’.

This term was defined by the World Economic Form in 2018 as a set of four interrelated trends: ‘an increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data; a blurring of the line between opinion and fact; an increase in the relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact; and lowered trust in formerly respected sources of factual information’.

So, when someone does not fit with the facts as I understand them, or if someone holds up a mirror to society, warts and all, and busts the myths perpetrated by my favourite party or politician, or if people do not qualify as ‘Maltese’ in my eyes, then I feel empowered to attack them verbally and move on to the next target.

We think nothing of this because we’re ‘just’ keyboard warriors. We’re just bluffing. We think that they’re just words. They’re not sticks and stones.

But what if inflammatory words are uttered by leaders? Words by leaders carry consequences.

What if words by leaders arm the people with sticks and stones? What if bad things happen to people because of these words by leaders?

While we share the President’s concern about the deterioration of the language openly used in reference to other human beings that suggests people think of other people as less than human, we note that these keyboard warriors are not being held to account for their words.

They are not sanctioned or reprimanded but are allowed to poison public discourse unchecked.

This is hardly surprising since the dehumanisation of Daphne Caruana Galizia is the most dramatic example of this modus operandi.

Worse, because as was heard by the inquiry into her killing the effort to strip her of human dignity was led by agents of the State which led to the stripping of her very life.

When the State actively ignores the killing of a journalist as a direct consequence of her investigations into corruption at the highest ranks of government, then the State is contributing to this deterioration in public discourse

Not one politician who incited this decades-long hatred towards her, not one apparatchik who helped to move from words to action, has been publicly denounced by the authorities, let alone arraigned. 

Furthermore, when the State actively ignores the killing of a journalist as a direct consequence of her investigations into corruption at the highest ranks of government, then the State is contributing to this deterioration in public discourse.

It is worth highlighting that the Maltese State remains hostile to Caruana Galizia’s work and memory. It is also ambiguous and halting in its qualified condemnation of her assassination. Inevitably, this other failure of the State is in itself a cause for division.

Sometimes words put sticks and stones in people’s hands. Other times these words put a bomb under the seat of a journalist’s car and a gun in the hands of racist soldiers who fire at migrants walking home after a football game. 

Words can kill. They are not neutral. Words never are. Words carry consequences and until words carry responsibility and accountability, public discourse will continue to deteriorate.

Unity is not a neutral word either for it demands commitment to the truth.

Unless we are ready to look truth in the face and acknowledge our failings as a nation, unity is not a dream but a mirage.