Never a Better Time

It is the time for taking stock of 2007 and making a guess at 2008. From my perspective everything in 2007 makes the change possible in 2008 all the more alluring, useful and necessary.

The economy has shown signs of recovery and the Euro changeover will be celebrated as some sort of certificate of economic strength. It is certainly a long way from the admission of deliberate deception in 2003. Thank God we joined the EU.

Had we not joined, that fatal admission of economic recklessness might never have happened until it was too late. We have been obliged by the EU Commission to provide an acceptable account of the administration of our public finances and bound to a path of economic discipline. Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi and Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech will bask in the light of success thrust upon them. So be it.

Would it not be wonderful if the EU Commission could poke its nose into everything else binding our governments hand and foot, delivering them like parcels to the next celebration of success? Unfortunately this is not possible and we remain solely responsible in very many areas where the EU Commission cannot and will not be our nanny. We are responsible for choosing a government that will act reasonably and sensibly in order to succeed

In a few days’ time we will be paying and being paid in Euros. For a while we will suffer the disorientation to which we are exposed at Christmastime when the holiday season makes it a little harder to make out which day of the week it is: a temporary need to keep our bearings a little more deliberately. A week or two into the New Year and we will behave as though we always dealt in Euros.

And then we will realize that getting into the Eurozone does not change the fundamentals. It will be very similar to joining the EU. There are benefits and significant ones for those who realize them and are in a position to take advantage of them. For the population as a whole there are advantages but they hard to perceive. There are also disadvantages and risks which must be recognized and dealt with. The Euro is not a magic wand which will take all our troubles away. We will still have to earn our living in a highly competitive world.

The New Year will be precisely like the old year, as it always is. The sun will rise and it will set, there will be rain and it will shine again. Even the general elections will come and go. The question is what will we make of it all? Just like EU membership and joining the Eurozone, it is a matter of what we will choose to do once the opportunity to choose has been secured.

The pattern is almost identical. The hype and frenzy of an election campaign preceded EU membership. With the Euro there is less controversy and less opportunity for hysterics. In all cases we are wound up for the event and distracted as to the unfolding of events afterwards. We are focused on a target and everything beyond it becomes blurred. It is extremely difficult to speak of the world beyond the target while we are about to shoot, to make the final choice.

Then, even as we fire, it dawns on us once more that hitting the target is the briefest of events in an infinite series. It is the stroke of midnight on December 31st. The party might not be over but the tension is gone. We will soon be back at work.

If the opposition had not bent over backwards to make itself an also-ran, the government would be in serious trouble. After twenty years in office, the PN could not seriously expect to win the next election if it faced anything like a reasonable alternative. It should be a foregone conclusion that Labour will win the next election but nobody has any reason to feel that way. The early months of 2008 should be a confident, almost majestic march to office for the Labour Party but nobody believes that they will be.

Nationalist spin doctors have had a hard time pumping up the fear factor. The dose of election campaign adrenaline prior to Christmas is not a sign of desperation as to the outcome but evidence of the need to gain time: to build up steam in an engine that will be hard to get going. There really is no Devil on the other side, so the spin doctors have to invent him. It does not help them at all that the Devil does everything possible to be a clown.

Still, they will persuade thousands upon thousands to vote in fear and safeguard the status quo….. from what exactly? A Labour government having run the country in the past few years would, more than likely, be stretching out to bask in the warm light of success on entry into the Eurozone if it had been bound hand and foot as ours has been. No matter who runs the country after the next election, the EU Commission and the European Central Bank will not tolerate the level of tomfoolery that were inflicted upon us by our governments prior to 2003.

If I were to choose just one achievement of the very many which Alternattiva Demokratika has secured for the Maltese through its very active, if short, political life, that would have to be EU membership. The taboo imposed by the Gonzi government on giving the Greens merit for their part in securing that epochal change certifies the efficacy of our key contribution prior to the 2003 Referendum. Our prediction has been proved right. The PN wanted to join the EU as some sort of insurance against the MLP. The MLP did not want to join because the PN wanted to. Neither of them has acclimatized to the EU environment.

The PN clocks up infringements of EU laws as though it had opposed EU membership and the MLP tries but fails to forget that it had opposed joining. Thankfully both are bond hand and foot to the mass of legislation which is a certain guarantee for citizens and endless trouble for recalcitrant politicians. The Greens in 2003 determined the future for the PN and the MLP.

In 2008 we have an opportunity to secure an even more fundamental change. This time, unlike 2003, the PN will be doing it utmost to prevent us. From here to the election the PN will scare the living daylights out of its supporters predicting cataclysm if the MLP is elected to government even though it knows full well that this is already a very remote possibility. It has already won over the MLP, what it wants to secure is victory over the Greens, over change.

Only the Greens can change Malta’s political landscape and everybody knows it. The PN leadership is challenged only by the Greens and the awesome possibility of the Greens being in parliament in a few months’ time to shake up the place for good. It is the one scenario they truly dread: for the first time in four decades they will have to do politics and not merely rule like sultans.

Beyond the target we are being invited to focus upon, lies to possibility of a completely new political landscape, something that we can all achieve in 2008 which we could not enjoy in previous years. As you draw your bow and hold your breath and squint it would add to your chances if you envision what you want to achieve. Do you really want everything to stay exactly the same as it is? Are you quite sure that the best thing to be had is a PN government free of any checks and balances, free to extend development zones illegally in a country possessed of 53,000 vacant properties?

Imagine an election result in which neither the PN nor the MLP can take over the streets in celebration after the election? Imagine no olé olé and no red flags. Imagine the settling down to form a coalition government requiring not consensus within a party but consensus between political parties, just as happens every time in almost every country in the EU. From that moment politics in Malta will change forever. It will begin to change from that very first moment. Everything that comes afterwards will be different and we will not return to winner-takes-all and governments held unaccountable thanks to the awful prospect of the alternative.

Since May 2007 I have been visiting people in their homes every day. It was a long, hot summer. The Greens did not wait for the PN spin crew to start the election fever, we opted for slow but sure. Nobody I spoke to assumed that Labour would win. Nobody. Yet another PN victory is as certain as it could possibly be at this point in time. The PN will return to power once more surprising their supporters who were made to believe that everything hung by a thread.

Never was it a better time to change the course of our history. Never was it a better time to have Greens debate in parliament to challenge and propose, to bring in a wealth of ideas attuned to the times, to take responsibility and to decide. It is time. It was never a better time.

My proposal for 2008 is for us all to take our time, to resist the pressures to focus on the stroke of midnight. It could be the worst thing we could do. The clock does not stop then. What do we want for New Year’s Day and for the days, months and years that will certainly follow? If we refuse to be rushed, panicked and stampeded, we can choose a better, calmer, more reasonable future in which ordinary citizens will have far more influence on the political class. The choice we have is between making our future and sticking to our past.

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Eyes Bright at Christmas Time

It was about this time some years ago when my son came home from kindergarten and announced that Father Christmas is a fraud and that God does not exist. A friend who had only just shed his own diaper had given him these certainties. My own upbringing seemed even more like a series of events in the late Neolithic.

It was not hard for my parents to have me believe in Father Christmas, the world conspired with them. Far from anybody contesting the existence of the Almighty, there seemed to be a wall to wall belief. We acquired our faith by osmosis simply by being exposed to the religious practices which permeated our daily lives long before we were formally prepared for our First Holy Communion.

We acquired religion and associated traditions just as we acquired speech. Did I even ask how Father Christmas broke into our house and delivered gifts for six children without the benefit of a chimney? Why should I? There were four angels guarding my bed every night and a guardian angel followed me around all day. All grown ups spoke about them so it did not matter much that I had never set eyes on them.

God was something like my grandmother who ruled a vast clan simply by being there. Her unspoken decrees were obeyed by the apparently infinite tiers of grown-ups towering above me. She was loved and respected by all the uncles, aunts and cousins who gathered at her house. Everybody was at pains not to incur her displeasure although I never heard her speak an angry word.

Nanna died in 1965 and it seems like a whole world died with her. Christmas was never the same after that. The vast clan had lost its focus, its five branches set apart to face the novelty of a world which combined the Cold War and the Cuban Misslie Crisis with the Vietnam War and Biafra with the mini skirt and the Beatles, the bomb, the pill and psychodelia. My guardian angel and all his mates had a hard time of it. I never asked him how he coped with Vatican Council II.

Malta went from misery to wealth. Emigration petered out as tourism picked up. Fortunes were made in the building industry and everybody waited his turn to scoop up the takings from a fabulous property deal. Politics was always a nasty business but it then turned deadly. All landmarks seemed to be gone forever. All certainties were gone.

Malta remains more Catholic than the Vatican but there is sometimes good reason to doubt whether it is even Christian any more. Christmas is good for business, indispensable for some businesses. Midnight Mass will be a standing room only affair as always with plenty of restaurants making a buck on Christmas breakfast. There are still plenty of intricate cribs to visit but can children be fascinated by a slow moving mechanical donkey when their own toys transform, squeal and pop to wireless command?

They will have to make their own way to belief or to the lack of it in a world with plenty of both. Wherever they get to, it will not be because everybody else did the same as far as the eye can see. They have something like a choice and they are brought up knowing that some do and some don’t believe. Their convictions will be their own.

One thing remains amid all the distractions: a child was born 2007 years ago and grew up to bear a message inviting us to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. Sheep and shepherds may no longer be a part of our daily lives but the birth in a manger still calls us to something better than the fattest bank account of all.

Every year, we are reminded of our own mortality by all the ghosts of merry Christmases past. Even as we feast we realize that time is more precious than money and that the twinkle in a child’s eye is worth more than anything we could buy.

We may rant against the hypocrisy and the exploitation of Christmas if we choose, but heart of the matter remains no matter how deep it may become buried in tinsel and crackers, puddings and macaroni: there is happiness to be found in touching somebody’s heart, a reward far greater than the cost of any gift.

It is a Christian message which has been taken up by non-Christians the world over because it was always theirs also. Christians may believe that He came to remind us of the best part of our humanity, all others can experience the truth of it directly. Christmas provides an excellent annual opportunity indiscriminately. If we realize that nothing can make us happier than making others happy, we may have saved our souls even if we have come to doubt their existence. Nobody can doubt that the world becomes a slightly better place for it.

Ironically the absence of wall-to-wall Christianity allows its essence to shine brighter. Perhaps the commercial hullabaloo provides a sharper contrast to the peace promised on earth to men (and women) of good will. Christmas remains impervious to it all, pouncing out upon us when we least expect it: in “the ghastly tie so kindly meant” or in the taste of mince pies which remind us of somebody who loved us well. The more we are urged to rush about to spend and celebrate, the more poignant it is when we are reminded that we too have a heart and that we need not be ashamed of showing it.

May your hearts be touched this Christmas and may your eyes shine in reflection of the joy you bring to others.

Not A Moment To Spare

Listening to Martin Scicluna giving a Strickland Foundation lecture on climate change and how it affects Malta was both novel and deja vu'. He described Maltese politics as trench warfare: a noisy, bloody business with the combatants yards away from one another but completely lost in the fog of war, unable to see the whole picture, unable to consider anything but the immediate; prevented from leading the response to a universal challenge. It was nothing new to me. It was new to have somebody of his calibre speak so clearly.

My job as leader of the Greens in Malta is to drive a wedge in between the other two parties and to drive them into taking a look around them before they proceed with their trench warfare. All my energies are now dedicated to gathering the support of 2,500 of the 23,000 or so voters in an electoral district in order to give Malta a Green presence in Parliament and hopefully in government. It is all I can do.

Meanwhile, I must concentrate on what I have to do immediately. If the Greens are not elected to Parliament, the post-2008 eco-consciousness of the next government will be governed by the need for their financiers to make even more money: climate change panic will be used to provide them with more millions; a Sarkozian conversion to all things ecological as part of his global sales pitch of everything nuclear.

All we need are 2,500 votes in any district to begin to bring the change about. Then we can negotiate and cajole, we will be able to raise awareness and inform public policy. We can then begin to influence events to head us in the right direction and force the positive exploitation of Malta's privileged voice on an international level. It will be backed by convincing action at home.

Greens have been far ahead of mainstream politics on climate change awareness; we are still ahead of most on the post-awareness era. Having been optimists in the face of cataclysms unrecognised for decades, we are confident that we can continue to be optimists and hold on to a far more encouraging vision than those newly arrived to disaster view.

The world has just begun to react. We must envision success because failure does not bear contemplation. All our ingenuity will definitely be devoted to providing us all with an excellent quality of life to be achieved at a tiny fraction of the energy we require today, with far less consumption of materials and very little waste creation. Climate change will bring about not only political change but also profound economic, social, technological and cultural changes. The very real threat of climate change puts us on the threshold of a new era.