Where have all the flowers gone?

What has happened to the youth of today? I frequently ask myself that question when issues and causes are dangling before them like the proverbial carrot and they fail, as if held back by an invisible hand, to take up the challenge of protest. Their general complacency is alarming.

Where are the angry young men of yesteryear? Where are all those young people who were confident that they would put the world to rights and whose music was John Lennon’s Imagine? Where are all those young people who, in the olden days, took part in Ban the Bomb marches? Where are all the Friends of the Earth? Where are all those bright-eyed, young people the type of which rioted against the establishment in Paris in the 1960s? Yes, their day came and went.

Today, people who believe in the ideals that galvanised them in the past are either superannuated hippies or complacent, middle-class citizens who have put it all behind them. The few young people who are anti establishment are not only regarded with a jaundiced eye by their elders but, ironically, also their peers who have been seduced by the stipends that encourage them to graduate and be gainfully employed but remove that sense of struggle and achievement that their parents and grandparents experienced in the attainment of tertiary education. They are also emasculated and are unable to realise how important a spontaneous protest against an injustice like censorship is. That is what they lack: spontaneity.

In a mere couple of decades, the memories of years and years of subversion and protest against a regime that purported to be socialist have gone out of the window and, in retrospect, we wonder what all this was about, whether it was just a bad dream. Were we really deprived? Were we protesting about water shortages or the non importation of chocolate and colour TV sets? Were we being manipulated by the politicos?

I believe that what happened in the 1980s was a direct reaction to what happened in the 1960s, a reaction exacerbated by the maverick Dom Mintoff’s private agenda that became part and parcel of a social services package that, in 1971, was of paramount importance. The agenda was crystal clear: vendetta, vendetta and more vendetta. Revenge against the Nationalist Party, which had achieved Malta’s independence in lieu of the Labour Party’s failure to achieve integration; diametrically opposed aims that, for half a century, have coloured our outlook and will take another couple of decades to disappear altogether. How can those people who were interdicted forget what they experienced? How can their children forgive the anguish and worry their parents went through? How can those parents whose children had to be educated in secret forgive and forget the underlying fear of being dissident in a state that was becoming more arbitrarily right wing under the rule of the aristocracy of the labour force, an elite the type of which sacked the Curia?

Despite our inherent differences in today’s world there has been a shift in what people want and this is mainly due to the expectations in the social sphere that have not yet materialised after being a member of the EU for seven years. These people are now experiencing the famous seven-year itch. It is undeniable that economically the EU has been our salvation, however this august body takes very little notice of the issues that touch our everyday lives and very rarely, and perhaps wisely, get embroiled in social tussles like the recognition of divorce or same-sex marriage in a member state, for instance, preferring to let the individual country paddle its own canoe as long as there is a mutual recognition of the results of social laws across the board.

Ergo this is why Malta recognises a divorced Swedish or Italian couple living in Malta and does not prosecute them as bigamists. This is why our holier-than-thou government is resisting similar recognition of same-sex couples and in the most alarmingly quixotic manner refuses to even countenance divorce or same-sex marriage in Malta while advocating the introduction of cohabitation!

Beware, the Lord is not mocked. If those people insisting that the introduction of civil divorce goes against God’s law are in favour of cohabitation then we must be a country populated by over-inbred morons totally incapable of perceiving the fundamental difference between the regularisation of dissolution of civil marriage and the utter mayhem that cohabitation will bring with it.

But enough of this tremendously over-milked subject. It will take another five years at least for divorce to be legalised as this referendum is an utter waste of time and taxpayers’ money as I have maintained ever since the ill-conceived Private Member’s Bill that was imposed on Parliament by a politician with nothing much to lose in a way that is colourfully described in Maltese as berqa fil-bnazzi (a bolt out of the blue). What I have found extraordinary in the fraught months that thankfully will come to a close on the 28th is that young people have largely ignored the issue.

The yes and no campaigns are being conducted with the last of the wannabe hippies against the pillars of the establishment that never dared wear a tie-dyed T-shirt or wear flowers in their hair let alone on their clothes. The campaigns are the stomping grounds of people on the verge of or just leaving middle age and the young people are as disinterested as those people in their dotage where these social issues are concerned, which makes me think they are either high on Prozac or are much wiser than we are for when it is their turn they will quietly do what they have to do and ignore all vestiges, social or religious, to regularise this confused and rudderless society in which we wallow. They will, I am sure, put an end to this vain quest to introduce a law that will allow people to conform to what will become permissible and not live out of the law legitimately. I feel it in my bones that young people are merely biding their time…

kzt@onvol.net