I've no doubt that in Malta, as elsewhere, there are people whose life circumstances have turned out as grim as could possibly be. The thing with bad luck is that it doesn't follow patterns or balance itself out. For some, it just keeps coming. On my part, I'm perfectly happy to keep paying a chunk of my income to help these people live decent lives.
What I'm considerably less happy with is what we might call the faqar brigade. This is a motley bunch of usual suspects who have made it their life project to tell us that Malta is a syllable short of Bangladesh, and that very soon we'll be forced into nicking sweets off children and counting the baked beans.
This being the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion (using such strategies as increasing MEPs' salaries and wasting stacks of cash commuting between Brussels and Strasbourg), the colours are out in force.
Don't even think of whispering to the faqar brigade that they might, just might, be exaggerating a wee bit. They'll eat you alive, garnished with invective like 'ostrich', 'apologist', 'in denial', 'government stooge', and so forth. If you somehow survive they'll proceed to fire three lethal missiles, as follows.
The first is that we deniers are more than just morally depraved. We're also ignorant. Poverty, the brigade will argue, is as widespread and pressing a social problem as any. Only, it's 'hidden'. The poor, the story goes, are so ashamed of their circumstances that they play rich. They may buy designer clothes and eat out but make no mistake, they haven't a cent to their name.
This is utter nonsense. If poverty were so rampant it'd be sure to rear its ragged head sooner or later. Ashamed or not, the hungry will beg for food and the homeless will sleep rough. That's because they have no choice, which after all is what poverty is about. The real reason why poverty is 'invisible' lies elsewhere.
People with green eyes are known to exist. They don't hide or wear brown contact lenses. And yet, we rarely see them. Why? Simply because there are so few of them that they melt into the population and become invisible, or almost.
Occasionally we will bump into someone whose eyes are in fact, green. Likewise, poverty does exist in Malta, and we do occasionally come across someone who is underfed or ill-housed. Only, unlike what the faqar brigade tell us, the poor are few and far between.
No matter jolly dodger, there's a second missile en route. The actually-poor may indeed be few, but there are thousands (about a sixth of the population according to Jerry Numbers) of people who are 'at risk' of poverty.
There's something tricky about this risk business. 'Risk' means nothing unless it can be measured. Crossing the road blindfolded and taking the Gozo Channel ferry both carry risks, but rather unequally I'd say. 'Risk', therefore, is real only inasmuch as it materialises from time to time. A few unfortunates have indeed died crossing the road carelessly, but so far no one has perished in the channel using the ferry.
By analogy, that 'one sixth' means nothing unless people actually become poor eventually. If anything, it means we're being very successful preventing vulnerable people from lapsing.
But there's a third salvo. How dare we be so glib about food shortages and homelessness? Surely we've heard of 'social' and 'relative' poverty? What of single mothers (apologies to the Ayatollah), people who never get invited to parties, and bullied children? And, in a world where air-conditioning and smoked salmon are de rigueur, are not ceiling fans and smoked haddock sure signs of dire straits?
At this stage I give up. If the brigade must have their poor, so be it.
Which begs the question: Why must they? The first reason is rather grim I'm afraid. A good number of them are clearly rent- seeking. Put simply, it pays to do poverty. Careers have been built, CVs spun, and lucrative consultancies landed, on the backs of 'the downtrodden'. There's political mileage to be gained too, if we can 'show' the country is going to the dogs.
But that doesn't quite describe everyone. The obvious (and by no means only) exception is Mgr Victor Grech. The exact opposite of a rent-seeker, he is a man who deserves our respect and gratitude for his excellent work in drug rehab and so many other fields. Which doesn't mean we can't take him to task on this particular faqar business.
I think we could be looking here at a belief, probably also related to religious values ('the poor will always be with you' and such), that there is always and unavoidably a dark side to material well-being. Thus, for example, wealthy people may spend their summers boating and their winters on the slopes and all that, but deep inside they're unhappy.
On a broader level, there's something suspicious about the fact that we haven't seen beggars on our streets for decades; that people living in social housing rip out decent bathrooms to make room for regal ones; that breakfast cereals at a fiver a pack fly off the supermarket shelves; that the only way to go to a restaurant on a Saturday night is to book well in advance; and that people in general look to be well-fed, clothed, and housed. Somewhere, somehow, something must be wrong.
Enter all the talk of broken societies, collapsing values, degenerate youth, and, yes, faqar. We've been drilled into thinking that, as Melville put it, the devil has something to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth.
I repeat that I'm sure there are people out there who need help. That's not my point. What I'm saying is that it's actually counter-productive to blow up sporadic cases into a general theory of spreading want. The risk is that we get so fed up listening to tales of faqar that don't quite match our observations, that we wouldn't recognise the real thing if we saw it.
mafalzon@hotmail.com