Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/234240
11 maltatoday, SUNDAY, 29 DECEMBER 2013 By turning down a national honour, author Alex Vella Gera may also have also forced us to confront the elusive question of what our nation state actually represents, and what we should or should not expect from it ing because there was a Labour government. The same people wouldn't have protested over the same issue a few years ago." Indeed you have to go back quite a few years to find a truly meaningful expression of national unrest. "When were the last really big national protests held in Malta? The ones I can think of are the Church schools crisis in the 1980s; and the 1960s, when Mintoff was challenging the hegemony of the Church. I don't remember the 1960s, but I do remember the Church Schools issue. In both cases it had to be the Catholic Church, to which everyone at the time felt a visceral connection, to galvanise a national reaction. This tells us something about our country, I think. People only protest when the things they hold most dear are threatened. The environment, corruption, greed... these things do not cause protests. Not even the oil scandal. The reaction to that was extremely tame..." The same rationale seems to apply to popular perceptions of his own action on 13 December. "What I find really sad – and here I have very little hope that things will change – is the sense of helplessness. I got quite a few messages, telling me things like: 'well done, we agree completely, but we can't do the same because we live in Malta. You don't. You live in Brussels. You can't be independent and also live in the system'..." The implication is that Vella Gera's own circumstances make rejection of the system slightly easier. But this only compounds the problem, as it seems to force people to escape the country altogether in order to free themselves from its shackles. At the same time, however, Vella Gera's own protests seems to have underscored one of the system's weaknesses. At the end of the day, national honours are technically conferred by the state: which is supposed (heavy emphasis on that last word) to be more than just the sum total of the two parties occupying Parliament. Vella Gera was in fact criticised for 'misdirecting' his protest: which seemed aimed at the suppsoedly non-political President of the Republic, and not at the parties themselves. "The issue is at a higher institutional level that politics alone, I agree. The real divide is not between the PN and PL, it's between whoever wields power and whatever interests they represent. I know there are people who are genuine in both parties. But who do they really represent at the end of the day? They look after each other. It's an institutional problem affecting all levels, and I don't know how it can be solved. What I do know is that there is need for a quantum leap of evolution." But even if one applauds Vella Gera's gesture... where does all this leave the non-politically inclined citizen? What's left of the Republic of Malta for the rest of us, if we boycott everything that has the pawprints of the political dupoly all over it? "Where does that leave the rest of the country? Yes, it's a valid question. We also have to ask ourselves what our Republic has become. Rai Tre recently had a feature about the sale of passports scheme. They came to Malta, and they portrayed us as an emerging new Dubai in the Mediterranean. This is what we've become. And both past PN and present PL are to blame. They are both very superficial, running the country as as if they were running a shopping centre. Their idea of what constitutes Malta, the Republic..." His voice trails to nothing, only to resume: "These are not the right people to be running a country that is supposed to be proud, to have a strong sense of identity. Theirs is a very mercantile philosophy. They don't see any further than the money..." Alex Vella Gera's 2012 best-seller: Is-Sriep Regghu Saru Velenuzi