Seasonal folly

If there is something that gives me perennial nervous tics it’s conditioning or better still the imposition by society to collectively behave in a certain way at a particular time. If we had to give in to this pressure we would all have to be in love on February 14, mourning our dead during the month of November and having a whale of a time during the last week of the year and the first week of the next one. The rest of the time we can forget we love anyone dead or alive and be collectively irate at the Hunters’ Association or the drivers of UFO’s (Useless Foul-smelling Objects) which we have to accept as buses, or madly taken in by a new dashing looking young politician and his “love you all” gushing wife or simply mad at an older politician with his arrogant stand on electricity bills.

Based on these criteria Christmas time is thus the season to be jolly. No questions asked. Even if you are going through one of the worst phases in your life, if your boss decided to sack you or if you or one of your near and dear is deeply buried in a sick bed or if your better half opts for someone else to complete his or her anima, you are faced with one option, that to log off your brain either by convincing yourself that you are living on another planet or else by saturating it with the Christmas spirit of the bottled kind. If, on the other hand, you are passing through a relatively peaceful phase, then you are obliged to attend to a variety of lunches, dinners or cocktails hosted by the various organisations, workgroups or social circles you colonise during the year and assault your digestive system with a variety of food and drink enough to fill the shelves of a chain of supermarkets.

It is also a must to buy everyone who owns part of your consciousness a gift, from your better half, to your cleaning lady and the gas cylinder chap whose haemorrhoids you would have been challenging for the past 12 calendar months even if your bank account is verging on mummification and every gift is packed with layers of petulance and resentment.

Uncannily, it is this aura of obliged abundance which makes people, especially youngsters, indulge more into dangerous behaviour of all sorts, reckless drinking and driving being the most common. In fact, from statistics published during the first quarter of this year it was determined that there was an 8.3 per cent increase in traffic accidents during the last quarter of 2007 when compared with the same period in 2006, an increase of 310 accidents. Of these, 277 sustained injuries, 62 of which were grievous and three led to loss of life. Most casualties occured in the 25-39 age group.

We all have a possession that we value above all the others. More often than not we would have invested a lot of ourselves in terms of time and money to acquire it and thus once we own it we treasure it and cherish it with all our being, doing our utmost to keep it out of harm’s way. In my opinion, for any parent there is no possession more precious than our children.

From the day they’re born, we literally shroud them in everything that’s the nearest to perfection as possible, be it the best schools, the nicest toys, the most trendy clothes, the liveliest of rooms, and we bend ourselves backwards to keep as much of ourselves available for their many needs, sometimes even before they actually feel that need. Then they grow up and leave the nest and the shroud is not there anymore. This marks the beginning of anguish time for most parents, the early hours of the morning during weekends and festive season being the most nerve wrecking. And when the nightmare does come true, then there are no words to explain or anything to be done to turn back the time and change things.

In a speech given at The Road Safety Charter Event, Minister Austin Gatt added that apart from the grave human loss, which to him is a matter of national mourning, the 16,000 road traffic accidents we achieved last year cost us an estimated €83 million in damage costs, medical fees and loss of production. To counteract this he is thinking of roping in “an Intelligent Traffic Management System in order to improve efficiency and flow of traffic, controlling speed and reducing congestion”. Well, as long as the intelligence won’t come from the same source as the bright spark who turned the streets of Valletta into a Ludo board and that the drivers and the rainwater will be adequately coached to match the IQ of the system, I am sure it will reduce the amount of traffic accidents at least by half even in a “il-passat hu l-garanzija tal-futur” country like ours.

So let’s hope that this system does materialise and not be shelved like so many other valid ideas before it were. And that for this Christmas we start thinking in 4D... Don’t Drink, Drive, Die mode… now that would be an intelligent traffic management dimension.

Source: Weekender, December 6, 2008