Does the headline of this article prick your conscience?
Did you click it out of a sense of slight indignation?
Is it because you feel that you don’t deserve to be lumped with a nondescript mass of people whose conscience has been drowned in a bathtub full of stimulants?
Or do you just want to shoot the messenger to avoid wrangling with the message?
Here’s the thing about history. It isn’t known for its kindness, nor for its fondness for exceptions. Assuming there’s anyone left to remember us after we’re done with our turn at the helm, posterity will summarise us – in the same way we summarised everyone who came before us.
So, although I know that there are many out there who are trying their very best to do what they think is necessary for their survival without causing too much harm towards others, it’s about time someone got real about a few things.
As a result of an atomised existence in which your neighbour can never matter as much as you do, we’ve lost the ability to coherently function as a collective. Not as a unified mass of individuals who dogmatically agree on a particular ideology, but as a species that should be somewhat concerned about its own survival.
The most obvious example of this ghastly reality is that bombing a country isn’t enough to earn yourself the status of a pariah these days. If you’re in charge of a powerful government with the means to obliterate entire cities, the most you’ll have to do is jump through a few rhetorical hoops to justify it.
Most people are indifferent to the fact that institutions that were built for the express purpose of ensuring war never erupts again continue to fail to take decisive, swift action in the face of overt aggression.
There is a dire shortage of authorities that have the credibility and integrity to fulfill their oath to serve society, positive political movements ready to usurp their outdated predecessors, powerful innovators who advance the scale and scope of humanity’s greatest achievements, journalists who have the means and the willpower to hold the powerful to account – even dramatists whose job involves satirising reality are struggling to outdo the sordid headlines we see on a daily basis.
The traditional hallmarks of democracy are falling apart, and future historians will have nobody but us to blame.
Does anyone seriously expect to be looked upon kindly by posterity when considering that we failed to put up enough resistance to stop genocides unfolding in front of us in real-time?
Europe, which once aspired to the role of democracy’s elite vanguard unit, quivers at the mere thought of considering sanctions on Israel as the latter rampages through the Middle East.
Our own government can’t even bring itself around to recognising Palestinian statehood, another one of the prime minister’s many broken promises.
If you want one more example of how Europe has lost its humanity, look no further than the refugee crisis and how we’ve decided to handle it as a continent.
Just last Friday, I was invited to moderate a panel at an event held under the banner of the Malta Refugee Council. It was organised with the support of Dance Beyond Borders. The event was held on the occasion of World Refugee Day.
A photo of some of the attendees at last Friday’s ‘Protection at Sea’ conference, organised by the Malta Refugee Council. Photo: Julian Delia
I like going to these conferences because it’s the kind of place where you will always encounter people who refuse to live in a society that rejects collective action without doing something about it. It is a brief but nonetheless crucial respite from the doldrums of slugging it alone.
On occasions in which the authorities bother to send a representative to defend their position, these conferences also serve as a safe space for sorely needed dialogue.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that home affairs minister Byron Camilleri delegated one of his key aides on the migration file, Matthew Cutajar, to attend the panel discussion I moderated.
I was even more surprised by the fact that Cutajar proved to be a well-informed technocrat who held his own in a room that was staring him down like a well full of daggers. The conversation was civil, in spite of the glaring divide between government policy and the devastating impact it leaves on people’s lives.
Having said that, even the best technocrat in the world can’t explain away the fact that the migration policy we champion as a nation revolves around not just sending people back to whichever hellhole they managed to escape from, but also actively deterring and discouraging others from even trying.
Our institutions don’t just look away from the suffering that is caused by their lack of action. They are active participants in this grand game of stripping away the basic dignity of every human being in favour of a set of cold calculations.
In the face of all this, it is understandable to want to cling to your turf, to think that as long as you keep doing what you’re doing, you and your loved ones will be alright.
However, that is also exactly the same fallacy that brought us to the brink. Of all the things we could choose to do in such dark times, far too many of us choose to look away.
Unless more of us decide that enough is enough, that is how we will be remembered: as the generation that avoided its worst horrors, right up until it couldn’t.