This is the year 2017. We live in enlightened days, the best of times. We have class, cash, chic style, classic and fancy cars. You name it, we have it.
We, the Maltese, are the privileged of the Mediterranean. Nothing is wrong here; and if, like our roads, things can be improved (those poor chic expensive cars have to ride on terror roads!), all will be fixed by Mr Super Fixit, our Joseph Muscat jack of all trades, master of the universe.
‘We are all right so ram you Jack’ we seem to be telling the whole Med around us, as we move relentlessly on in our progress while they swelter in raging jealousy.
Whoever would have imagined that the Maltese archipelago would host a whole legion of foreigners who come here to earn a living? We are the envy of the world.
Cicero—the Roman guy—spoke of our honey as being the best in the world. But a modern Cicero would have found it difficult to praise our honey as there’s little space for bees to swarm and fill honeycombs with their sweet stuff. However, he would surely have waxed lyrical about our country and its high rises and lifestyle.
He’d have eulogised the noise, the trees razed to the ground, the cranes in every corner, the rage, the filth on the roads, the traffic gone berserk, the need to walk in the middle of the street because coffee shops have taken over our pavements, the pollution. We are quickly killing our super lifestyle and soon we will kill our golden geese, their golden nests and all their descendants.
We are quickly killing our super lifestyle and soon we will kill our golden geese, their golden nests and all their descendants.
But is anyone listening? Does anyone care? More sales of apartments, more building of lifeless cubicles, more mayhem on the roads but we all love it here, so why worry? Why worry if there is no plan and no discussion of what life will be like in five, ten or twenty years. We have never had it as good as now so why worry about the future, especially a distant one?
Back in the day of the Grandmasters of the Order, the dictators who did what they wanted, they too built towers. All over the land they erected towers to look out for enemies from the sea. These were the watch towers to sound the alarm if the enemy approached.
Today the dictators are gone and the old towers are no longer used to watch out for threats from far.
Today all our newly-built towers do is ruin our views, our old-style living and turn our land into a ghetto of chic, rich people.