Please stop talking

This is my column in The Malta Independent, yesterday.

The pain of the families involved in the tragedy which occurred on New Year’s Day in Sliema is compounded by the indecent behaviour of those who are speculating wildly, discussing the subject in public on the internet, and jumping to conclusions.

It is not just horribly insensitive and uncivilised, but also unwise.

In situations like this you cannot assume anything. That was my initial reaction on New Year’s Day itself, and it is still my view four or five days later because of – rather than despite – all the conflicting and confusing pseudo-facts which are emerging.

All the newspapers now seem to have voluble sources in the police force. We are expected to believe that those sources are the very same ones involved in the investigation, who are ready to undermine their own investigative efforts merely to help a news reporter.

It is wrong and irresponsible to assume even what some people have taken for granted: that Nicholas Gera, by all accounts a very quiet man, forced his way into the flat through the roof and that he was the initial aggressor.

It was cruel and stupid to rush to the conclusion that one of the victims died defending his family against a murderer, making him a hero, and to say that the other victim should burn in hell for the ‘murder’.

This black-and-white thinking is symptomatic of great ignorance.

It is equally irresponsible to create crime-of-passion scenarios involving X but not Y, Y but not X, or to assume a crime of passion or even a relationship of that nature at all.

Regular readers of my column know that I am an Occam’s razor sort of person who favours the reasoning that the simplest and most obvious explanation is likely to be the correct one. But in this situation, what is being passed off as the simply obvious is really not that obvious or simple at all.

I do not say this because ‘I know something’ or because I wish to make a statement, but merely to point out that assumptions are extremely dangerous and can create even more pain, strangely enough, than the truth. The people involved in grief and tragedy can deal with the truth eventually, but assumed falsehoods and gossip can kill them a thousand times over.

The details which will emerge are almost certain to be extremely difficult for the families of the dead, as though they don’t already have enough to contend with. The rest of us should just keep quiet, not only on the internet but even in our own minds. I know that this is difficult. I have trouble doing it myself.

Instead of turning ourselves into amateur sleuths we should try to understand the savage cruelty of a world in which some people are made to suffer for the rest of their lives in the worst way possible, when they have done nothing wrong and deserve no such life sentence. Think about this for a while: your struggle not to despair and sink into despondency should distract you from your gossip. It is this aspect of the case which has monopolised my thoughts.

The last thing those left behind should have to deal with is tittle-tattle all over the internet and the rest of the media. Knowing that there is spiteful talk going on in private is bad enough.

I can see why there is such a temptation to gossip, speculate and turn what should be a private tragedy into a public scandal. All the elements are there to pique people’s curiosity, malice and prurience, much of it derived from envy and that most unpleasant aspect of human psychology: some people’s need to persuade themselves, because they have neither of the two themselves, that success and money are not all they are cut out to be and that they ‘can’t buy happiness’ (money can indeed go a very long way towards buying happiness, given that most problems and stresses are caused, directly and indirectly, by the lack of it).

But in reality, these are not public figures we are talking about. They are not politicians or film stars who seek our acclaim or our votes. They are/were private individuals. There is no right-to-know imperative, as there would be if there was a murderer on the run, posing a threat to others.

There is only the wish to know, and a wish for information is not a right to information. People are not divested of their right to privacy by situations like this. The only justification for the release of certain details is transparency in the meting out of justice, in a court of law.

It is unfortunate that one of the individuals involved seems keen to talk as much as possible, encouraging that which he purports to avoid: the stripping away of his family’s privacy by the media.

Even if we did have a right to know what happened and why, which we don’t until and if the matter reaches the prosecution stage, which it might not do at all, we certainly should not be talking about human-beings as though they are cardboard cut-outs or characters in a television soap opera. This is not Eastenders. The deaths are real. The people involved will never recover, even if they seem to do so.

This sort of behaviour – gossiping and speculating in public about the newly dead and the freshly bereaved – used to be considered vulgar in the extreme, the diversion of the sub-literate and the disadvantaged. But now everybody is apparently at it, and this malicioius pleasure in the misfortune of others brings us all low.