A vote for political culture change
Posted by: kaizenlog in Kaizenlog, tags: A vote for political culture change |  |  |  |  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr. Harry Vassallo has sent you an article from timesofmalta.com.
______________________________
(Friday, February 29, 2008)
A vote for political culture change
I have voted Green in four general elections, three local council elections and in the European Parliament elections. There seem to be thousands of people who cannot fathom why. They seem to be singing in chorus the same stuff they sang in 1992 and ever since at every election. They can have no idea that it becomes easier and easier to vote Green at every election.
Why hundreds of people have contributed to the Green project every day for the past 18 years must be a mystery inside an enigma for them. How can they understand the reasons why people give up all their spare time, thousands of euros in foregone earnings and more in out-of-pocket expenses in the thousands of days between elections?
It is hard to explain to people who live in fear and have become used to it. Through the 16 years of pathological government which consumed my youth I became convinced that the extraordinary, violent and spectacular excesses of the Labour government were the product of the problem and not the problem itself. In 1987, I voted PN. The immediate action needed was the ousting of the Labour government. I also knew that it would not be enough. It did not change the political system itself.
What boiled over in the 1970s and in the 1980s had been ticking over since the 1950s. The process of polarisation had developed into extreme polarisation and, finally, into political violence, corruption and the violation of human rights. Our political culture had developed into two totalising camps, mutually exclusive, occupying the same territory but living in different worlds. Who or what could bring us to reason?
Eddie Fenech Adami deserves the country’s eternal gratitude for managing the post-civil war period, the 1990s. To this day there are some people who seem to bear him a grudge for not wreaking revenge on those who had beaten them, intimidated them, wrecked their lives or ruined them financially. Dr Fenech Adami brought the country out of violence and towards normality. In government he took the country as far as the PN could take it. Alfred Sant is never given the credit by his adversaries for having done his part with the opposition. They both did what they could, not enough.
It was clear to me and to the others who founded the Greens in 1989 that it could never be complete as long as we kept the two-party system in place. The problem was the two-party structure, the deep cultural polarisation, the profound festering wounds which never heal and which are exploited at every election to renew the pain, the fear, the hatred and the blindness. Neither one of the two parties which necessarily cause, exploit and exist in function of the eternal division can ever be the force which heals the division.
No matter how hard they try, no matter how sincere they may become, they are the enemies of the other side which can never regard them as an honest broker. Nationalists are as blind and deaf to Labour as Labourites are blind and deaf to Nationalists. Both remain capable of justifying the unjustifiable of their own side in fear of having the other side rule over them. We remain bound hand and foot to a political system that ensures unaccountable government endorsed in its misdeeds by its support, limiting itself to complaint between elections but remaining in faithful submission at the polls.
I neither fear nor hate anyone. The quality of freedom I enjoy is a privilege I will never surrender. Only those who have stepped outside the two-party paradigm can know the feeling. Since 1975, when I first had the right to vote, I have been ruled by single-party governments which other people have supported enthusiastically and which I have felt inflicted upon me. I have lived well in spite of them, not because of them. I have resented the arrogance and the violence, the corruption and the smug reliance on legal labyrinths to deny ordinary people just remedies. Propaganda is a form of violence which I have never become used to. The blatant hypocrisy enjoyed by partisans continues to make me retch. I am glad that I live outside it.
I have watched as the workerist rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s was replaced by neo-liberal materialism to justify the same excesses and maladministration. I have watched as our natural resources and our cultural heritage are squandered and destroyed, collateral damage nonchalantly discounted in the pursuit of progress so called. First it was because Malta was a developing country which could not afford such bourgeois values as conservation.
Then it became part of the eternal compromise in which we continue to halve the remainder of our children’s birthright in order to make more money. How can the panic stricken begin to understand my determination to drive a wedge in between the two sides? How the urgency grows from year to year! They seem blind and deaf to what I see and hear.
All this comes to a head in a few days. Most people will vote as their fathers and grandfathers have done before them. Those who will not vote in disgust at their own party ironically epitomise the total mind control of the single-party paradigm: Hurt or disillusioned they still cannot bring themselves to commit the apostasy of voting for any other party. They stop short of voting for the profound change we need as paralysed as those who preserve our problems.
Those who can bring about a profound, worthwhile change are those who refuse to be panicked, those who walk out of the mental prisons, those who have a wide perspective, a long-term view both forward and backward in time. When will we become a normal country if we do not vote for change, for change of our political system this time? A mere change in government will not be a cataclysm but it will be a bitter disappointment, yet another flip of the same old omelette. It will mean that not enough of us are ready yet to secure for themselves the freedom which the Greens have enjoyed for 18 years and which we want to make a gift to our country. It will mean that our common future is postponed once more.
My vision is of Greens entering our Parliament in a few days, just as they have entered the Parliaments of nearly all European countries. Ideally Greens in government as they are and have been in government in several of the other EU member countries. There it has meant the placing of new perspectives, of contemporary values on their countries’ political agenda. In Malta it would mean much more. It would entail a definitive break with a past which clearly still infects our present and which still threatens our future. It would be a political watershed for Malta much more than simply a success for the Greens.
I will put my vote among the 2,500 which will elect a Green in my electoral district. The alternative is to waste it in the 50-50 gamble among another 200,000 guaranteed to leave things as they are and as they have been all my life. My vote will be for real change, now, not in another life.
Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika – the Green party.
www.alternattiva.org.mt, www.adgozo.com
Welcome back to Kaizenlog.com, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed , Twitter You can contact us by using the contact form or submitting a comment. You can also share this post with your friends by clicking on the 'ShareThis' button above. Thanks for visiting!
Print This Post
Entries (RSS)