What does a grieving planet look like?
I never thought I’d ever open a column with such a question. But today, I must, for the simple reason that I’ve witnessed a lot of grief as of late. It’s hard to let go of it. Like trying to shake the sand out of your belongings after a day at the beach.
I am not just talking about personal loss. I am also talking about that sense of displacement that follows the realisation that the world around you is run by hostile freaks with no real regard for human life or its intrinsic value.
According to my notes, the last time I experienced something similar seems to have been a year ago.
A month into the criminal proceedings against disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat and his associates, the weary grind of court reporting was getting to me.
Don’t get me wrong – it felt right to do my duty as a journalist. The part that got to me was knowing that so much had to be sacrificed for those proceedings to even happen.
How many patients did not receive the kind of healthcare they deserved because millions of euros were diverted to the offshore accounts of the greedy and the corrupt?
How many blows were swiftly delivered to justice’s body as it lay on the floor in a fetal position, all in the name of granting criminals another day of freedom they do not deserve?
What grief could we have spared ourselves if the state actually was in a position to act on Daphne’s reporting?
At the time, I also remember experiencing catharsis. Finally witnessing criminal proceedings against Muscat and his merry band of conspirators was encouraging.
It was grief – but it was also a release. We fought hard and lost a lot, but we were finally getting somewhere.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the fact that, in spite of these tentative first steps in the long road to justice, pretty much everything else continues to deteriorate.
The surest sign of a society in decline isn’t as tangible as the economic indicators which we typically use to measure wealth.
The real indicator of a country’s downward spiral is the amount of discord that people experience in their lives. Unrelenting hedonism is another useful marker, though not as telling as the general chaos that we hear about in the news.
As it happens, the online front pages of Malta’s largest newspapers earlier this morning really drive this particular point home.
Today, we’re not really talking about the individual implications of each and every violent headline we’ve seen in the past few days, but the bigger picture that often hides behind them.
This picture that can only be fully appreciated when you manage to connect the tension that animates petty fist fights with the vast cruelty that is enabled by a corrupt government.
We’re talking about the consequences of the proliferation of crime, rather than crime itself.
The outcome of the constant acrimony between people who live in their own echo chambers, rather than the individual arguments themselves.
The desperate floundering of the law as it cracks down on the powerless and completely ignores the powerful, not the selective instances of enforcement that may otherwise give the impression of a functional state.
Above all else, we must talk about how the profoundly evil intentions that underwrite these systemic failures denature humanity.
The damage that injustice does to the human psyche is comparable to the way in which boiling water irreversibly warps the physical structure of your food.
After all, what is this collective grief if not one global outcry against unopposed evil?
What is the unspeakable savagery that the Israeli apartheid state continues to inflict on Palestine made of?
How can you explain a monster like Jeffrey Epstein, or his former close friend, Donald Trump? A hellish fiend like Vladimir Putin? Or any other sick fuck who has committed the worst kind of violence against the world?
Evil begets more evil, and we’ve had plenty of that to go around. Our grief is the manifestation of a collective failure to address evils so large that they are almost inconceivable.
The worst specimens humanity has to offer are in charge of the nuclear launch codes. A lot of us seem to be content with sitting back and hoping that our leaders didn’t mean it when they said their fingers were hovering over the big red button. The rest of us understand just how much they meant it.
When all the headlines show a constant stream of collective loss, anger, madness, and grief, it’s very easy to claim that it’s just part of the media’s sinister agenda to keep you hooked with clickbait.
Some of us in the press don’t care about much more than grabbing your attention – that much is true. I suspect that’s also what you would expect me to say if I was lying to you as well.
I cannot expect anyone to simply take my word for it. All I can tell you is that I write with moral clarity, backed by clear evidence. It’s up to others who cannot say the same to justify why they put themselves in that situation.
The fact that some members of the press care mostly about having your undivided attention does not automatically exclude the existence of a far more sinister truth: that the situation really is dire.
That your decision to shut out the grief will never be a permanent solution to the man-made horrors unfolding around us.
Reality demands your attention, and right now, it’s asking for urgent course correction.
The bottom line is that we’ve gone beyond grief’s threshold. Grief must be replaced by action, the kind that ensures that we never have to experience this level of dehumanisation again.
After so many decades of living in artificial comfort that could only exist by capitalising on the suffering of the unseen and the unknown, the least any decent European could do is stop behaving as if we’re all powerless. Stop existing in a bubble. Stop trying to escape suffering.
Start fighting, before there’s nothing left to fight for.