A few weeks ago, I decided to take the bus to Sliema instead of driving there. The bus was packed, but I managed to snag a seat and sat quietly watching a YouTube video. As usual, the peace didn’t last.
A few minutes into the journey, the people standing in front of me started moving to the front of the bus, leaving my eyeline clear to see a man who was seated opposite me mumbling to himself. Or at least that’s what I thought he was doing because I had my headphones on.
I started to register that something was off from the frightened look an Asian woman gave as she suddenly approached the driver to speak to him, and I removed my headphones quickly to witness a racist barrage from the man I thought was talking to himself.
I didn’t have time to act; the driver abruptly stopped the bus and asked the man to leave. It was an awful thing to witness, and I honestly felt deeply ashamed that a fellow countryman would think it was okay to say horrible things completely unprovoked. The problem is that this incident is far from an isolated one.
According to an article by MaltaToday, a campaign aimed at raising awareness about racism has been inundated by thousands of racist comments on social media.
As you can imagine, many of these comments were vile; however, a significant portion of them referenced Malta’s overpopulation issue. It is clear that people are feeling more and more suffocated on our little rock, but as usual, their anger seems to be directed at the wrong people.
The reality is that we can’t blame foreigners for coming here to seek a better life. Our forefathers did it when they emigrated to Australia and Canada, and our children are still doing it right now when their dreams become too big for our limited resources.
If you must point fingers, it should be in the direction of our authorities who claimed that we couldn’t rescue a few hundred illegal immigrants from the vicious seas a few years ago because we allegedly had no space for them but who were then happy to allow tens of thousands of people into the country post-COVID.
If you’re going to make it so easy for people to come over and do the jobs your own people won’t do because they’re comfortably getting fat off a bloated, unchecked social service and phantom government jobs, you’re hardly in a position to complain when third-country nationals do show up to the party. If scapegoating is your thing, at least put your money on the right goat.
Oh, and by the way, you’re not better than anyone just because you happened to be born here; you’re just luckier.