Sunday 22 January 2012

I Fought The Law and The Law Won

This morning, I woke up to everyone forwarding a link to an article regarding what seems to be a Hate Crime. I believe the most shocking part is the fact that according to Maltese Law, hate crime at the moment only covers racial hatred - not sexual orientation.

The Maltese Legal System is pretty outdated at times.  In a Society where a pothead growing plants at home gets jailed for longer, and fined considerably more, than thieves involved in hold-ups or reckless drivers who plough down children, no wonder a lot of people are quickly losing faith in the system.

I for one have long maintained that we live in a state blanketed by a false sense of a security. The real social issues such as poverty, homelessness, hate crimes, etc are all swept under the rug or played down to be easily shrugged off and have the spotlight turned away from them.

I know quite a lot of foreigners who moved to Malta not just for the Sun, but because it is a "safe place" to raise their children. Truly, I don't think any place is safe any more.  Yes, you can walk down the street at 4am on your own and not be mugged,assaulted or raped more often than not.  However, that does not mean we live in a safe place. 

If we look at statistics, we could easily be misled into believing Malta to be some sort of Earthly Paradise.  The truth is - those statistics are usually biased and do not portray the true picture- especially when people are encouraged to keep everything hushed in order not to stir up more shit.

Everyone seems willing to complain about how badly things are going in this country - but few are willing to make their voices heard and speak up for themselves.  The vast majority of people are happy to just grumble about the status quo and do fuck all about  it - simply not to be in the spotlight.

It might come to a lot of people as a surprise - but I consider myself to be an Anarcho-Pacifist.  Whilst I'm aware that Anarchism is doomed for failure when you try to put it in practise purely due to the egoistical nature of humans, to me it is still the one political stance that makes the most sense to me. We can agree to disagree about this if you'd like.


Looking at the world around me, it makes me wonder how on Earth am I meant to teach Creature to believe in a system I myself have lost faith in a long time ago. Where the laws put in place fail to protect our best interests, I find that you simply have to play the bureaucratic red-tape bullshit games just to survive at times.  I came to this conclusion by myself back in my early teenage years.

I understand that it is not expected that I try to explain politics and whatnot to Creature when s/he is still very young- however I can't help but wonder how the heck I'm to approach the subject when the time comes.

When it comes to my Pacifist tendencies - well, it is a topic that is often portrayed in movies where one parent doesn't condone violence, and the other one does. In my case, there isn't a second parent to play the Good Cop Bad Cop routine with.  I can only hope that Creature takes an interest in Martial Arts.  I myself used to practise a long time ago- and I recall the emphasis placed on the fact that this was to be considered merely Self Defence, not a manner to learn how to beat people up for the sake of it. 

On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to introduce you to Blackberry Bear- born in the early hours of the morning.

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