Unhappy family
Wrong washing machine
It tangles the clothes
The clothes won't come clean
How they regret
The day they didn't get a XXXX
XXXX washes cleanest
It never tangles clothes etc

How much simpler life was back then. We had no PCs or mobile phones. Telephony was carried out through human operators who knew where your mother was and whether your aunt had gone out shopping or Mrs So and So was on the roof hanging the untangled clothes.

We had nobody fulminating about divorce, gay marriage and other basic human rights; in fact, we had no idea what human rights were apart from the fact that John J. Cremona spent most of the year judging human rights cases in Strasbourg. We had no idea what global warming was or climate change, for that matter, and pollution was an unknown quantity.

Cancer was a rare disease that was spoken of in hushed tones if at all. Children played in the streets and were rarely run over. They did not get asthma from the exhaust fumes either.

We got our news through the Rediffusion and MTV and the more sophisticated honed their proficiency in the Italian language and watched Telegiornale. Nobody, but nobody, worked in the afternoon in summer and the beaches were full of Maltese families relaxing on public beaches without commercial concessions and cooling down in crystalline seas without jellyfish plagues.

The Church's word was absolute and final and one lived according to a preset social choreography with predictable lines and even more predictable endings.

I could go on and on.

Four decades and more later and with the unimaginable becoming the norm, sci-fi technology available in our pockets and bags, are we any happier? For many, the 1950s and 1960s, decades where World War II was still a raw and recent memory, with ration cards still in circulation and bombsites still there for all to see, have become iconic. As the Western world emerged from the ravages of yet another "war to end all wars" we had a fresh-faced Elvis Presley leading the drain-piped and coiffed teddy boys in their winkle pickers and the exquisite Marilyn Monroe in billowing skirts exuding a sexual allure that triggered off the revolutions of the 1970s, whether it was about women's lib or gay rights, students' franchise or Ho Chi Minh!

We battled through the 1970s and took part in Ban the Bomb marches wearing bell-bottoms like spinnakers, tank tops and platforms. We were awed into gobsmacked silence by the antics of the Iron Lady in the 1980s and, as the age of the Sloanes drew to a close, the younger generation found themselves with nothing to protest about. It appeared as if the fin de siecle had emasculated that post-war rawness and, as the millennium crept up on us before we knew it, complacency set in. It seems to be there to stay.

What has happened to us?

As the price of oil peaks at $135 a barrel can we envisage going on living the charmed and pampered life we have been groomed to lead in the last 30 years? How much longer will we be able to afford the luxury of freedom of movement with as many cars behind our doors as people in the street? Will we go on air-conditioning ourselves as the temperatures rise to egg-frying-on- pavement levels because of our misuse and abuse of the world's resources? At oil prices like these I somehow doubt it. Not unless the man in the street is Croesus himself. The Noughties have not been a pleasant time for us inhabitants of planet earth. Apart from unjust wars fuelled by greed that have exploded in the perpetrators faces like the proverbial egg, we have had unprecedented natural disasters, the latest two being the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China. If one compares public reaction and attitude to these two new disasters to that of the tsunami a few years ago one will realise with deepening shock that we have become complacent and unmoved by the statistics of death that are computed with such sickening accuracy, disinterestedness and detachment on our TV and PC screens.

So, as we in Malta squabble about petty political issues, hoarding fireworks and the ignominious elimination of poor Morena from the Eurovision tamasha, we typically miss the wood for the trees and cannot conceive what is going to be done to preserve our pampered lifestyles in a world that sinks deeper into woe and cataclysm. Do we carry on regardless? As the Four Horses of the Apocalypse canter about the world spreading pestilence, war and famine do we in Malta imagine that we have some special dress circle seat as privileged spectators of a tragedy to end all tragedies? I somehow doubt it.

kzt@onvol.net