On the first day of summer last week, it rained. Not a sneeze of a little passing grey cloud, but a full blown thunder-and-all mid-winter soaking rain. Whoa!

My most precious strawberry plant, which I had gently watered in the morning, seemed to be drowning in the downpour, its leaves drooping, begging for a lifebuoy; the dog looked at me baffled, wondering what had happened to her sunny spot in the garden; and the tortoise retreated to his winter house cosying up for an unexpected hibernation. And me? I just frowned at the sky. I’ve been waiting for summer since, well, since last August. So please tell me this was a fluke.

No. It looks set to be one of those awful summers with lots of Force-whatever wind and rain. We know because we have it on the good authority of my sister’s neighbour in Rabat.

The first time she told my sister not to “hang clothes out on the roof today because it’s going to rain”, my sister looked up at the clear blue skies, nodded, muttered some polite words, got in the car and went to work. Two hours later her clothes were water-logged. The next time the neighbour made a similar suggestion, my sister nodded urgently and dashed up the stairs to get the clothes off the line.

Therefore, when the neighbour now tells her that it’s going to be a weird summer, we believe her. She knows her Irwiegel (Calends). She is a walking encyclopaedia of that unscientific, folkloristic, but utterly fascinating system of weather forecast based on checking the skies from December 13 to 24, with each day representing what the weather will be like for the New Year’s 12 months.

So the rain on Thursday was part of the topsy turvy weather plan. Or was it? Maybe there could be another reason for this indignant weather. As blogger Mel Hart said: “Is this Mother Nature crying out at the tree massacre happening in Malta?” I passed by the Balzan trees early morning last Friday and placed my hands on each tree bark, whispering apologies. Soon our children will not know what the bark of an old tree feels like, let alone climb one.


A few weeks ago I spent some time looking at hotels in Monaco, and some days later at roof-top verandas. As a result of this, my Instagram thinks that I am obsessed with Monaco and verandas and is all the time pumping my feed with adverts of rooftops and casinos (always featuring a woman with a drink in hand).

Instagram, which belongs to Facebook, is watching me. And it’s trying to control me, and to push me to do things, because frankly I’d love to be that woman always with a drink in hand and nothing else to do.

Soon our children will not know what the bark of an old tree feels like, let alone climb one

There’s no two ways about it, social media is thwarting our reality. Not only is it giving us this mad urge to portray our lives as perfect, but it’s also feeding us things that it thinks we want and makes us believe we want them.

But there is one other great worry. Social media, in particular Facebook, has become a machine that churns out hate.

Please do follow The Shift News’ series of investigative research on Facebook hate groups, which have 60,000 members managed by the Maltese government.

Shift journalists have gone undercover and have documen­ted how the Prime Minister, his head of communication Kurt Farrugia and other government officials who work at Castille (i.e. we pay them from our taxes) are members of Facebook groups with a hidden agenda: that of egging members to whitewash the government’s scandals and lambast any critics of corruption. In other words, the government is using social media to control news and to shut people up.

The Prime Minister does not see anything scandalous in this and has not even bothered leaving these groups, even though they systematically ridicule gays (addio progressive in civil liberties); blacks – “All the migrants of the Aquarius ship are coming to take our jobs!”; or any other minority. These are groups that instigate racism, xenophobia and fear-mongering, and the Prime Minister approves with his very presence.

The way human nature works is that, even if you start off not identifying with the spine-chilling and unnerving statements, when you see them once, twice, then every day flashing in front of your eyes, not only do you start believing them, but you also start becoming outraged and drivelling for blood.

The sad thing is that the presence and the power of these online hate groups is growing each year. These are rotten spaces where souls are groomed to become darker and nastier. They are spaces which bring an end to the spirit of community, and are replaced by bullying – from all quarters – when we speak out in favour of basic civic duties.

The Prime Minister can speak of unity in his speeches but in practice we know that he’s fanning the flames of strife and hate. If his conscience is at peace with that, it’s up to him. But that means it’s up to us, citizens, to oppose and put a stop to this abuse so that the soul of our country does not shrivel into dead roots.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti

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