Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/602004
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 15 NOVEMBER 2015 26 O f all the bizarre insults ever levelled at me over the years – and there've been quite a few, some more deserved than others – the one I never got my head around is… 'do-gooder'. So I'm a 'do-gooder', huh? I kind of like that. 'Do gooders', by definition, 'do good'. And last I looked, people who 'do good' were regarded as more beneficial, in the general scheme of things, than those who 'do evil'… or, for that matter, nothing at all. For that reason alone, I hardly think the cap fits when applied to yours truly. But what the heck? Some people clearly think I do some good in the world, otherwise they wouldn't call me that. So why not just nod in acknowledgement of the compliment, and move on? Oh, and it often comes accompanied by other equally anomalous 'insults'… such as 'bleeding heart' and 'tree- hugger'. Which of course raises the question: on what grounds, exactly, are any of those epithets supposed to be insulting? Take 'tree-hugger', for instance. I don't recall ever physically taking any tree in any warm embrace… (and before Birnam Wood comes marching towards me with an army of saplings: please note I'll insist on DNA testing before acknowledging paternity in any of your claims, thank you very much). But even if I did hug the occasional tree here and there… who knows? I might have been drunk at the time… well, so what? The most you could say for that sort of activity is that it is kind of pointless, really. Trees do not crave human contact like humans do; indeed they lack the sort of nervous system that would be required to actually appreciate a good old-fashioned cuddle anyway. As for 'bleeding hearts'… well, one has to actually have a heart for it to bleed. Far better for your heart to bleed, than to lack both heart and blood in your veins. (Just ask the Tin Woodman, he'll tell you all about it…) In any case: whichever way you look at those 'insults', they are all ultimately complimentary. The qualities they infer – altruism, philanthropy, sensitivity, environmental conscience, etc.– are all universally acknowledged to be positive things: the possession of which actually makes one a better person, not worse. It is failure to possess those qualities that most intelligent, sensitive people would find offensive. And the first people to admit this are none other than their detractors themselves. Look at it this way: if such expressions are hurled as insults, what does it tell us about the qualities admired by those doing the hurling? They must, by their own reasoning, be people without a trace of altruism or philanthropy anywhere in their bodies… people without the capacity for empathy or emotion… people with no sense of responsibility for (or affinity with) the other living things they share this planet with. That, by the way, is the textbook definition of a psychopath. Call me a 'do gooder' all you like: but without even thinking about it, I automatically know which side of the fence I'd rather be on. OK: by now you will have realised that this is building up to a response to some of the (expected) criticism I got this week over an article published last Wednesday. In case you missed it, it was about the use of solitary confinement as a punitive measure embedded in our legal system… with particular reference to the sentence handed down to Nizar El-Gadi for the murder of his wife in 2011. First off I must acknowledge a mistake in that article: El-Gadi was actually sentenced to 10 days of solitary confinement five times a year (not every five years, as I erroneously wrote). The error is regrettable, but at the same time it only dramatically underscores the astonishing severity of the sentence. That's 50 days of solitary confinement a year… when the maximum urged by the EU (and even then, as an internal prison disciplinary measure… NOT as a sentence handed down by a court of law) is 14 days. The sentence was therefore infinitely more barbaric than I at first surmised. It is not just redolent of the 19th century… it is positively medieval. I said it last Wednesday, and I'll repeat it here. Solitary confinement, as a punitive tool wielded by the administrators of justice, has no place whatsoever in a 21st Opinion The opposite of justice Raphael Vassallo The sentence was infinitely more barbaric than I at first surmised. It is not just redolent of the 19th century... it is positively medieval