Last Monday’s car explosion was an incident that disrupted people’s daily lives. Roads were closed, investigations were underway and, a man lost both his legs.
Yet, the thing which concerned the public appeared to be more concerned about the ripple effects of this incident, than the incident itself.
The reaction of people around me was all negative. People complained about their tardiness, about Malta’s poor traffic system and inefficient buses, about the justice system, the government, and the criminals and about how the victim “deserved” what he got as he was involved in crime too.
Hearing people grumble about every single thing that is wrong in Malta, made me look at things differently. As I was on a bus and stuck in traffic, I was thinking about the explosion in a different light: how did it happen? Why did it happen? Was the victim alive? Did they rescue him in time?
People were so eager to label the victim as a villain and a gangster, that for a moment they seem to have forgotten that primarily he was a human being… Reading articles and the comments beneath them, at one point I got confused whether I was reading an article or the biography of Vito Corleone.
As much as we pretend to care about others’ occurrences, we couldn’t care less. A migrant strangles himself with a an electric cable, but instead the people perceive him as an "intruder’ and don’t even try to think that deportation for this human taking him back to his homeland is like taking him back to hell? But society perceives him
The way people had resorted to thinking was a good generalization of society’s way of thinking. I get that it’s a big deal when something happens on this little island but is that the way we should react to incidents that have not directly harmed us? We’re living in a world in which people are way too self-absorbed. What if we started to go out of our way to help others? What if we chose to take a decision that would benefit another person more than us? What if we decided to stop grumbling about every little thing that went wrong and instead focused on making life a little more positive?
