Just as caring for our private home is an important duty so is caring for our common home. This is either Planet Earth if we look at it from our perspective as humans or Malta if we consider it from our perspective as
citizens. Besides being of utmost
practical importance this duty is also a spiritual and moral one, so much so that Pope Francis speaks of sin when these duties are shirked and we consequently harm creation, the poor and future generations.
“To commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God,” Francis states in his September 2016 Message marking the special day he specifically set for prayer for this common home of all humanity.
In several documents and speeches the Pope emphasises our duty to promote environmental justice, concern for the poor and responsible social commitment. He always ties together the crisis of the physical and human dimensions of this common home as he believes that this is a complex crisis which is both social and environmental.
In this message he exhorts us to repent of the harm we are doing to our common home. He lists the sins committed in this regard: growing “comfortable with certain lifestyles shaped by a distorted culture of prosperity and a disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary” and becoming “participants in a system that has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature”.
What Pope Francis says of our common home as humans applies equally to our common home as Maltese. A humanly dignified living together in this common home is disrupted whenever sectorial benefits are considered to be more important than the common good, when individualism trumps solidarity, when spin undermines truth, when the few lord it over the many and when the privileged move forward at the expense of the vulnerable.
Living together in our common home is disturbed when obscure dealings, secret accords and cynical attitudes become mainstream government behaviour in spite of various laws and public promises to the contrary.
Are these families not stealing from the rest of us a big chunk of our sea shore just to satisfy their greed, as if they are going to live forever?
The worst enemy of healthy communal living in the common home is similar to the worst enemy of healthy communal living in our private home. Whenever some animals are deemed to be more equal than others discontent results aplenty.
In Maltese we refer to ‘preferenzi’ between siblings as the ultimate poison of solidarity in any family. In our common home the ‘preferenzi’ may be because of party loyalties, greasing of hands, family connections, business acquaintances formed during informal fenkati or majjalati in some secluded farmhouse, and so on and so forth.
Policies based on these ‘preferenzi’ are divisive and undermine the unity that should reign in our common home as privileging one sibling over another undermines the unity of the family abode.
This utter disgust at ‘preferenzi’ explains, for example, the strong reaction of common people at the utter disregard of their rights by big-moneyed bullies. What right do owners of fish farms have to illegally farm in double the area allotted to them? Then to add insult to injury they pollute our sea in which we swim, endangering our health and imperilling our jobs in the tourism industry.
Is it right for the Prime Minister to take only a couple of minutes to surrender our common garden at Żonqor Point to a Jordanian speculator? Is it not obscene that an attempt is being made to reclaim land from our sea at St Julian’s just for the benefit of the same small number of families who are amassing more and more millions while the number of people in the risk of poverty is increasing? Are these families not stealing from the rest of us a big chunk of our sea shore just to satisfy their greed, as if they are going to live forever?
One cannot justify priapic monsters at Mrieħel and Sliema simply because someone else would have built them, as we have recently been told. How cynical! If I don’t bully you or rob your views or degrade your way of life someone else will, so instead I will do it for my profit at your expense. Incredible. They expect us to believe that they are doing us a favour as, they say, they are embellishing our common home. How arrogant!
How condescending can government be when it expects us to comply in the most docile way with the ravaging of our common home just because the big-moneyed bullies have thrown some peanuts (a miserly €50,000, to be exact) at us uncouth natives – as it seems they consider us to be. How cynical can they be?
Are they serious when they expect us to believe that the razing of all values in our common home is not the result of pre-electoral pacts? Written pacts possibly there were not, but winks and nudges there surely were aplenty. Besides, I know of no one who does not believe that the lining of pockets possibly accompanied all this, thus enabling the populating of secret accounts in some far-flung exotic location.
They would probably say in public that they have a quiet conscience and that they sleep quietly at night. Good luck to them. Both heroes and villains appeal to their good conscience. I will surely not interfere in or judge people’s appeal to conscience. But perhaps it is pertinent to remind them of a quote by American comedian Steven Wright: “A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.”
Faced by the present tidal wave of cynicism, cronyism and corruption, one tends to lose hope. Pope Francis’s words in his encyclical on the environment are like balm in such circumstances:
“Yet all is not lost. Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start.”
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt