Sean, se naghmlu riot?

Riot? No

The Times reported the arraignment of a certain Sean Zammit from Birkirkara for attacking police officers. Our Sean was described as a "Mercedes-driving 19-year-old with two girlfriends" who allegedly attacked two police officers for no apparent reason when he was stopped for particulars. Sean seems to be quite a strong babe magnet. His two girlfriends were present in court and "each hired a separate lawyer to take good care of him". Stand by your man indeed.

Rather uncannily, the same edition of The Times ran an amusingly ponderous piece on whether there is a threat of Maltese youths taking to the streets like their peers in the UK. Click here: "Experts do not predict a-riot". All sorts of self-consciously weighty reasons were floated by the "experts", as The Times called them, except the really important one: we don't do riots.

Had we been the type, the 1980s would have been a decade-long riot against the Labour regime. Instead, ordinary citizens of the Nationalist persuasion occasionally fought back because the police and the army attacked them. Back then, citizens protected themselves from police riots. Most citizens did not even use their vote to riot, let alone put on a balaclava and go out to get some serious street mayhem going. The violent and corrupt Labour regime lost the 1987 election by only 4,000 votes and I have it on very good authority that had it been constitutionally possible to postpone the election by a few weeks they would have bought even those in the same way they did the rest - favours, jobs, kickbacks and and more corruption.

Even history shows that Maltese youths are made to take take strolls on a seafront or Strada Rjali in their Sunday best rather than riot and getting their pants dirty. Note how some historians and politicians drool over the 1919 bread riots when only four people died and how Labour inflates the 1958 police scuffle as if it were the beginning of the American Revolution. Even Raymond Caruana's openly political murder brought forth only subdue religious rites and political vigils when it should have sparked a civil war. Let's face it, we set candles alight, not buildings.

And if Maltese youths did not riot in the past, they are not likely to pick up the habit today. If even Dom Mintoff's regime did not put youths on permanent riot duty, Lawrence Gonzi is not about to have the honour in the mid-August heat.

The invading continental English language schools students might provoke one but it will be of a different sort. Sean would be on the spot in a moment to load up more women into his Mercedes.