It’s a Monday afternoon and I’m in bed, debating with myself whether I should get up and be productive or watch TV series.
Obviously, I put on an episode.
Suddenly, my mum enters in my room without knocking.
“Did you hear what happened?”
I don’t like her tone.
“Daphne Caruana Galizia has been murdered.”
For a few seconds I remained silent. I then rush to the kitchen and stare at the television. I could see the remainings of the car in the middle of the field. I instantly check my social media and that was the moment when it all started sinking in. It was all over Facebook and Twitter and while, as expected, a hefty number of Maltese citizens expressed their shock in the circumstances, there were others who felt that she got what she deserved or that she brought it upon herself. The latter explained that she shouldn’t be glorified because she harassed too many people with her writings.
What a sad country.
Honestly, this has nothing to do with politics. Expressing support for one political leader rather than the other would not make sense in these circumstances. What staggered me the most in the past couple of days was the fact that as the whole world conveyed the feeling of shock that this death has brought upon them and the connotations that it has in such a country, our main priority remains to defend our respective political parties. Meanwhile, we fail to acknowledge how detrimental it is that a person like Mrs. Caruana Galizia is murdered in such a gruesome manner.
Had she died in a car accident or a natural death, it would have been explicable for people to judge her actions and writings throughout her journalistic life. But considering the way in which she was assassinated, the whole country should be in grief – if not specifically for her death as a human being, for what her death represents.
But unfortunately, certain things or mentalities will never change in this country and to hear a number of University students thinking that this death will be in any way beneficial to our little nation makes the situation even worse in my eyes. I assume that when the Cahrlie Hebdo attacks took place in Paris, the majority of these students were amongst the first to write "Je suis Charlie’ on their respective social media profiles, feeling that they are indeed beacons of freedom of expression. I do not agree with most of the material published on Charlie Hebdo, and in the same way, I don’t agree with a lot of material that was published on Daphne Caruana Galizia’s website, but they each had the ultimate right to publish it.
After all, Daphne is now gone and those who feel that getting rid of her will make our country any better, will be the same ones embarrassingly telling their children, in fifteen or twenty years’ time, how in 2017, a blogger got murdered because people didn’t approve of the way she spoke.
