Nobody in Malta wants to live in the equivalent of Singapore, and with good reason. The most hellish democracy is preferable to the richest and most comfortable dictatorship.

The question it raises is what to do. Two suggestions: 1) education needs a total overhaul to inculcate new values, and 2) enforcement to punish offenders needs to be zero tolerance and severe.

Sweep out the detritus from the current generation and ensure the next doesn’t fall into the same trap. Lessons can be learnt from the Singapore story.

Who will be the leader that stands up for future Maltese generations in the same selfless, ruthless and visionary way as LKY did for his beloved Asian island?

I don’t see this person (her or, less likely, him) in the current political or business landscape. And in a partisan democratic poltical system, it is hard to know where she or he will come from or how she or he will get the power base to effect actual change. Suggestions welcome…

And that’s what comes to the surface! And it is thus up to all those good and vertical and moral and ethical people to take a stance. Stand up and call out the wrong as a wrong! Just closing an eye, and minding our own business does not cut it anymore.

What others do ends up tainting you too, us all! We cannot just keep rationalising and justifying stuff. Let’s have the guts to look into the mirror and then work on changing ourselves.

It takes effort, and perseverence, and it may be embarrassing, but we can achieve change only by acknowledging our faults and idiosyncracies. Then we need to walk the talk. All day, every day!

At one point, I gave up. What Ryan says here is spot on. In six years in Malta he has pretty much nailed all that is wrong with the country.

Please, enough of this. Part of the problem with the Maltese mind is all the rubbish it has been fed from the age of 3 in the way of nation-building myths.