It was hard not to vote for the Nationalist Party in 2003. Back then it was all about national unity, billboards of children in red and blue T-shirts hugging each other and a bright future in the European Union.

It would seem that many excuse children for showing disrespect towards others – whether teachers or fellow students

The PN message seemed to be that, “Malta u l-Ewropa taghna lkoll”. The PN acted as if everybody’s opinion mattered and as if everybody was on board for the great EU venture. All those consultuation meetings and ears-on-the-ground may very likely have been a cosmetic exercise, but at least the PN bothered to go through the motions.

Nine years down the line, it is patently obvious that the party cannot drum up enough energy to do even that. The Taħt it-Tinda meetings cannot really be called dialogue meetings. They’re simply morale-boosters where the Prime Minister preaches to the converted. I have yet to come across footage of one such event where the clapping crowds are not largely made up of Nationalist candidates and diehard supporters.

But outside the tent, the PN is floundering, having given up on the possibility of persuading the electorate and resorting to its time-worn methods of scaremongering and doomsday scenarios, if a Nationalist government is not re-elected.

The party is fighting today’s elections with yesterday’s weapons, not realising that the public mood has shifted. It is this refusal to adapt and change which may well cost the PN the election.

• Sifting through the morass of news items related to the electoral campaign, a non-political item caught my eye. It was entitled ‘Mothers set up a group against bullying in schools’.

The mother of an eight-year-old girl was inspired to set up this support group – or rather the obligatory Facebook group as one does these days – when her daughter was bullied at school. I read through the article carefully, to see what kind of bullying was taking place behind school walls.

It turns out that the girl claimed she was being bullied by fellow pupils. The bullying allegations were looked into by the school staff, but at one point the girl did not do her homework.

She was called up by the assistant head who told her off for this. In the course of this telling off, the teacher told the girl she was a silly little girl or that she was behaving like one. Apparently this mild rebuke – if you can even call it that – was enough to draw out the mother’s inner lioness and to make her march over to the school demanding the resignation of the teacher who had dared addressed her daughter in that manner.

That’s right. The mother wants the teacher who made the “demeaning, disrespectful and disempowering comment” to grovel and apologise to her daughter and to be removed from her post.

When the teacher wasn’t fired on her say-so, she gathered a couple of friends in solidarity, they sat down on a sofa and addressed the press. They are now on a mission to raise awareness that treating children disrespectfully should not be tolerated.

To hear them talk, or to read the bleating comments of their supporters online, you’d have thought they were militating against caning in schools and ritual humiliation by sadistic teachers, instead of kicking up an almighty fuss about an innocuous comment.

Let’s get this straight, excessive punishments and needless cruelty of children is never on. No one is advocating the return of corporal punishment, but it seems that now we have gone to the other extreme where no-one can discipline a child, however mildly, without being accused of traumatising some mother’s precious poppet.

While there’s a lot of talk about respect being a two-way street, it would seem that many excuse children for showing disrespect towards others – whether teachers or fellow students.

I can’t forget the particularly nasty incident which happened earlier this year, when a teacher was violently assaulted by a boy’s mother. The mother kicked the teacher, slapped her, threw her to the ground and yanked her hair. All this because the teacher had ordered the boy to stop hitting a classmate violently on the head – an order which he completely ignored.

You would have thought there would have been outright condemnation of the mother’s actions. However, there wasn’t the widespread disgust and condemnation you would have expected in the circumstances. Maybe this is due to the now commonly-held belief that children should never be scolded or – heaven forefend – disciplined.

Which brings us to the situation pertaining today – where a girl who is told off for behaving in a silly manner can have the press highlighting her piteous plight and a furious gaggle of parents up in arms over such a trivial matter.

It seems to me that she isn’t the only one being silly.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt

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