Chronicles of stories yet to happen

As dawn breaks out two days before New Year’s Day one looks at the year about to end and tries to peer into what the new year might bring with it.

The year that’s ending brought with it, at least that’s how it appears to me, more than the usual quotient of deaths, some indeed sudden and unexpected. You thought you had grown used to everything and yet things still manage to surprise you.

It would be wrong to categorise all that’s happened as bad or negative. There are things that happened that were positive surprises too.

By and large, I must say, the world around us has continued to be the wonderful world it has always been. Maybe this is a skewed vision or maybe the terrible cataclysm is just round the corner. Or maybe the world will continue its tottering progress in the coming future regardless of what the doom-sayers keep saying.

We have no idea what’s coming next. The terrible scenarios we sometimes imagine and terrify ourselves with might not happen at all and many times we get hit with completely unexpected dramas and/or shocks. It is only when we get to the end of New Year 2023, if we do get there, that we will understand what has been in store for us.

On the world level the ongoing drama is the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the hundreds of thousands deaths it has already caused and the devastation it has already brought about. Some still hope the new year could bring peace talks but down at ground level the two sides still harbour dreams of outright victories, however improbable.

This war has put everything else in pause mood while it has spawned some growth industries, such as the development and use of unmanned drones.

If the intention of Russia, or rather of Putin, was and is to get Ukraine back into the hegemony led by Russia, the invasion and the war seem to have had quite the opposite effect – Ukraine is now a country with a definite self-image which is definitely not Russian at all and leaning more and more towards the West. This is not something that the West brought about but rather the direct result of the Russian hamfistedness.

The invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated the difficulties of the rest of the world to deal with spreading poverty which now subjugates large swathes of the world including pockets of deep poverty in the First World itself.

Despite the many international gatherings and much trumpeted about agreements aimed at improving world trade, the world is still split in competing blocs and the world’s poor are still awaiting the much promised new dawn.

Apart from vicious wars about which we rarely hear, all this continues to create an immense flow of people seeking a new future in a country different from their own. Governments practically everywhere try to repel or at least control this tidal wave with very limited success – watch the flow of migrants into the US from the South despite Donald Trump’s wall.

As for Europe the flows of migrants continues from the East and the South and across the Channel into England. There have been migration flows into Europe for decades now and in a sense they have been relatively integrated and contribute to the economic growth of Europe and the UK. We never get to hear about the one million migrants that Angela Merkel welcomed in 2015 which leads me to conclude that at least a substantial portion of them have learned German, a very difficult language, and are getting training and integration in the manufacturing sector.

Otherwise the continuing migrant flows continue to determine political outcomes from Spain to Hungary and were quite fundamental in Giorgia Meloni’s victory in Italy. And of course they, or rather the perception of uncontrollable flows of migrants were the determinant in the Brexit decision which continues to impact on the British economy which in the year now ending saw off no less than three prime ministers.

Historical processes cannot be docketed by year – they flow-on like a lazy but deadly stream. They have a gestational development all of their own. And they allow us to have the long view.

This is how I prefer to use to look at our country. 2022 was the year of the general election which saw a massive win for Robert Abela and a massive defeat for the Nationalist Party. Yet this election was curiously without any input about the migration problem which survey after survey showed it topped the concerns of the Maltese.

But that’s what I mean by historical flows – sooner or later this issue will have to factor in the Maltese political scene. Just as reaction over the hurried and pressured abortion amendments will sooner or later impact on the Maltese electorate. This happened in the affluent USA, and after so many years of easily available abortion.

The past months, both before and after the election, have seen the accent being put on the gilded packages this administration keeps giving its own while putting up a strenuous defence in the law courts on charges of corruption. This will continue over the new year.

And this gets me to my final point. The past year has shown me the emergence of courageous individuals who continue to sprout out of nowhere to defy and challenge the establishment. Though as yet disparate and uncoordinated, they exemplify a unique historical process which their targets simply lack. These are, for me, the Persons of the Year and they constitute the real reason for hope as we begin the new year.