Biggie in Malta

I’m in Malta. It’s a stunning paradise, which is also fairly cheap because it’s not a prime tourist destination. My first day in Malta, I found myself in the most unpleasant institution of all, besides US Congress: a behemoth mall. I had to get shoes. After staving off multiple panic attacks taking escalators crammed with people, I ended up in one of those generic stores where you buy dependable shoes.

I watched the public tear through sales items. “Pfft. Rampant consumerism,” my lefty brain pretentiously said to itself.

I walked up to a sales clerk to ask if they had a pair of shoes in my size. He promptly conjured an app on his phone, because everyone is annoyingly young now. “We have, we have,” he said in an accent. He was a young man. I’d guess Syrian or Lebanese.

He sported a t-shirt with Biggie Smalls’ face on it (requisite point about American soft power that leads to a 20-year-old from Syria or Lebanon living in Malta to throw on a t-Shirt celebrating Biggie from Brooklyn).

Anyway, as I bitched in my head about how annoying the checkout line was, I noticed something: There were like countless nationalities in the store, working as well as shopping. Swedish tourists alongside Nigerian immigrants. Middle-aged red-faced Brits alongside native Maltese people alongside Syrians and Egyptians and Eastern Europeans. And the next thing I noticed is that everyone was beyond friendly to everyone else. Like, jokes about the line being long; bitching about the horrific heat, etc. It almost felt like, “Well, we all have to be very nice to each other lest this society devolves into chaos.” And it was wonderful.

OK thank you for indulging me. Here’s my point: every year I go to Bulgaria. I write something to the point that, despite all of the country’s problems—corruption, relative poverty—there is very little violent crime. When it occurs, it’s usually caused by beefs between mafiosos, which really don’t impact normal people. Walking home alone at night, as a woman? No concern.

Whenever I write this, my racist Twitter reply guys are like, “Aha! That’s because it’s an ethnically uniform country” (aka nearly everyone is white.) To which I think: I will deny this to my dying breath, but fuck, maybe violent crime does occur less when everyone pretty much looks like you.

But look at these crime stats in Malta, which is bustling with refugees from every country that “Fortress” Western Europe fops onto poorer EU members like Malta, from an article in the Times of Malta: