Just as a bus was about to drive off from a stop in Ħamrun, the driver noticed a man lying unconscious on the road. Immediately she pulled the bus to the side, switched off the engine, quickly got off and ran to assist him.
There she found another man standing over the casualty. He turned to the driver and told her: “Can you phone for help because I don’t want to use my mobile credit.” She did so promptly.
At this point, as I was reading the report of this story on Times of Malta, I took a sharp intake of breath. If you are really sure that you don’t want to use your mobile credit to call for help, then it’s good to know that it’s totally free to call Emergency 112 or Ambulance 196. So even if you have no credit, you can still phone them and you won’t be billed for it.
Meanwhile, as the driver was calling from her mobile for help, her passengers got off the bus. One of them complained: “Hey, can you get back in and get on with the trip?! We’re in a hurry here!”
The bus driver looked at the man still completely passed out on the ground, and then at her passengers. What on earth was happening to the world?
When, at the end of her shift the bus driver, Fontaine Pace, went home she posted on Facebook. Where was the country was heading, are we becoming a heartless nation, she asked.
“True, life has become fast paced, but have other matters become more important than a person’s life? Where are human values, have we started closing our eyes to everything?” she wrote.
The bus driver’s story is unfortunately not the first I’ve heard which marks an acute decline in the sense of civic duty.
A friend of mine, the nurse I often mention here, was driving in Mosta the other day when she saw a man sprawled on the pavement, completely lost to the world. She stopped and ran to help him. Two men sitting on a bench not far off, shouted out to her: “Ħalliħ ħi, dak ilu hekk!” (Leave him alone, love, he’s been like that for ages).
It’s totally free to call Emergency 112 or Ambulance 196… so even if you have no credit you can still phone them and you won’t be billed for it
And another friend had a similar experience in Valletta recently. An ambulance couldn’t get through to reach a woman who had fainted in the street, because of restaurant tables blocking the way. When he quickly ran up to the restaurant to offer help to quickly push back the tables to make way for the ambulance, he was greeted with a flurry of expletives, and the ambulance men were told in no uncertain terms that they had to go round all of upper Valletta and come back from the other side to get to the injured woman.
If charity is not even starting at home, then of course we should not be surprised that there isn’t an iota of empathy for people who have been through harrowing experiences to leave their homeland for a better life and give up all their life savings to cross the dangerous Mediterranean Sea.
The result is that we have children being told by their parents to hurl insults at the exhausted migrants getting off the MV Lifeline rescue ship, after days at sea. “You take our country”; “We don’t like black people”; “Black people want to kill us”. (Please watch Darrin Zammit Lupi’s Reuter’s video clip – it’s horrifying but this is ‘hospitable Malta’).
Instead of nurturing empathy in our children we are instilling hatred and teaching them – by example – to scorn the neighbour in need. It all goes down to a sore lack of civil engagement: working to make a difference in the life of our communities and putting together our knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference.
For centuries, communities always felt the need to uphold the public good as opposed to pursuing one’s private interest. I was recently reading an article by Oxford University historian Dr Joanna Innes about the topic. She recounts how private interest was always thought of as material gain, an indolence, while public good was lauded.
Now things have changed, she says, and we value wealth and personal pleasure more than communal good. “Civic duty changed and shrunk, and it became legitimate to spend your life in pursuit of personal gain.”
If you ask me, the nouveau riche principles have taken over and penetrated our souls and hearts.
Finnish people have a word that is very difficult to translate: talkoo. It means “getting the harvest in, stocking wood, raising money. It’s about cooperating. Everyone together, equally”; in other words, working together, collectively, for a specific good.
We need a lot of talkoo, and rather than send people back to their countries (for certain death, let it be known) I think we are the ones who definitely need to go back to the country we once were.
krischetcuti@gmail.com