Since a couple of years, I have started to notice a marked dissonance in Malta and its people. I go to shops, ask for and get a service, interact with the people in the brief periods when I visit. The persons who I deal with are nearly always so… sweet and gentle. In Maltese we have an expression: taz-zokkor, literally, made of sugar.
Contrast this with some (many) Maltese car drivers’ attitude – aggressive, impolite, verging on savage; the fact that they (we) have elected a band of corrupt criminals to lead the country, that the office of the prime minister is deeply implicated in the murder of a journalist and that in spite of this well known and established information, the majority of the people still support the party in government; the fact that vicious hate speech on social media and comments sections of online news beggars belief.
The former genuinely sweet, kind, helpful and gentle people and the latter… horror show. I want to believe that the hate criminals are a small minority. It’s the only way I can explain my overwhelmingly positive first hand experiences. The alternative would be that sitting behind a steering wheel and mentioning politics to Maltese people transforms many of them (us) into Mr Hyde.
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