Sorry for this rather long delayed write-up although I am not too sure that this post is going to redeem my negligence since I am utterly lost as to what is good to write about.
I suppose the last GE was emotionally draining for most of us. Everybody is so earnest in championing their own personal cause such that each whom like to convince the other to think likewise. I suppose such religious fervour is only elemental to us creatures who recreate, for without passion, life is tasteless. This rousing emotion that we have experienced at home, a bit of it now gone here, but can be seen spread around the world for different reasons but still among the blessed trinity - religion, race and politics - and I should add economics as I think about the fringe European countries.
So, we all reckon we can change the world by force, by crying for things we want and demand them to happened. Human beings used to appeal to the heavens, and I suppose many still do. Now, there is greater appeal to the politicians as if they are gods. Everybody is looking for a leader who they hope has the vision, the way and the willpower. We could be in a very dangerous frame of mind, when mob rules and moves in strange ways.
The only thing missing is a clarity of thought of what needs to be done, and how it can be done in a simple manner, without the great elaboration that is often thrust upon our society when some guy with no ideas pretends that he is Moses leading the people out to the promised land. I don't think we should all be sitting what for somebody else to do the things needed, so should somebody else things they can do good for us. While joining the crowds may not be the best way - although it may invigorating for the soul - I think it is the small little things we do every day to help ourselves and our neighbours that we can bring real change to our own backyards and our surrounding environments.
With such a chickening thought, I shall rest my case and write no more rubbish.
12 comments:
Reading the post above, one is reminded of Goethe's Faustus and Voltaire's Candide.
Their common theme was on man's titanic struggle for some ideal beyond his minute ken.
Towards the very end, Dr Faust redeemed himself in a yearning for the pure and Candide mused that one must tend to one's own garden.
And that is why chickening thoughts have a role to play as well. Because the excrement from that fowl is germane to stopping stem rot in one of our most important export-earning plants.
Why do we write? We want to suggest points of views so that people will have additional inputs to rationalize for themselves the right thing to do.
Why this need? Because implicit decency has been dethroned by explicit indecency until what is right has been banished by what is politically convenient.
One reckons at its most elemental, GE13 was all about that.
What is wrong and what is right?
What is wrong is you have a very sick doctor of the house dispensing very toxic medicine at huge prices set by his chummy suppliers to fawning patients clueless about the real costs loaded into the future, what more their lives and the health of their communities at stake. Because he has inoculated a persistent virus which only gets stronger with each dose, making his patients depend more and more on what is bad to worse.
What is right is the absence of demarcations in those small farms. The farmers have an implicit understanding amongst themselves that they will not harvest the fruits from the trees of their neighbors even when there is no dividing fence.
You cannot distinguish one tree from another and yet each knows where his end and his neighbor's begin.
For all their simple ways and lack of mental finery, they espouse the basic tenets of understanding and cooperation, perhaps a common appreciation that all are ultimately bonded by some unseen force to thrive or suffer under the same sky so that one is beholden to do the right things even if doing so causes personal discomfort.
Which of course comes and goes.
It is well and fine to tend to our own and immediate surroundings. We look out for our friends and neighbors.
But if a haze from faraway can affect pulmonary functions here, the range of what is considered neighborly can widen rather quickly.
Which would explain why hotlines are posted at traffic lights so that motorists can call to ask for repair should such lights malfunction, causing jams.
In the same vein, politics. If a government persists in malfunctioning itself without demarcations, then it needs to be repaired.
Governments cannot be repaired by people retiring just to tend to their gardens.
Because in the absence of contrary objections, they will take silence as consent until even consent is banished by license to steal, for that matter kill.
Until...
Until fear of change is embedded deep in the roots of the mind.
Because...
Because people fear that asking for changes will trigger reactions that will strengthen the very problems that are to be solved.
However...
However if nothing is done, how can matters improve.
For...
For it only takes good men to do nothing for bad things to recur.
Unless...
Unless one wants to remain bad.
In this best of all possible panglossian worlds.
The two-party balancing act has not worked. Because one side wants to dominate the entire sphere of influence and it utilizes every resource at its disposal by the fiat of a simple majority that however was artificially constructed and generally rejected.
Suffice to say, it is only accumulating its own karma. However one that will be discharged by the very peoples that it presumes to serve.
The same people that one can count as friends and neighbors. If eyesight is bad, such as at this age.
No?
To put young students to have their meals in a washroom is downright unhealthy, what more demeaning. It smacks of cordon non-sanitaire.
While one may understand the sentiment for doing so, namely for the others who are fasting not to suffer at the sight of others not suffering, the very purpose of the practice is to develop consciousness of the connection to the Unseen One through personal privations.
How does making others suffer as well contribute to their similar connection to the same One in all but name?
The action taken will only diminish their view of their peers and their faith, and cause more marginalization and division in a society still easily swayed this way and that by sentiments bricked in by shallowness. Like the walls of that washroom.
Extend that sentiment about a faith into the quota policy for admissions into public universities and we can see straight away how race and religion mire this nation in some political quicksand that sucks the life out of all.
If a scholar gets great grades, he or she must get a seat in the course chosen even if that means another seat will have to be created for the one displaced or if that be not possible, opened in another institution.
Otherwise...
Otherwise this country will lose not only good students
But...
But also good lecturers.
So, don't bother talking about rankings, high-income economy, advanced status.
Because there's nothing advanced about rejecting a best results student, for that matter putting students to eat next to a bidet.
Yes?
What in the world is happening is politics has corrupted good minds and hearts until even hope for better changes has been cast afloat to drift down the river of no return.
But salmons thrive only by swimming upstream.
Etheorist,
Great to see you back blogging. GE-13 took its toll not just on you, but on all Malaysians that desire a responsive and clean government to led Malaysians to a brighter future. JRR Tolkien wrote in LOTR that "It is the small things that keeps the darkness at bay"., so you are not alone in such thinking. But Walla is also right that if we were to take a back seat and remain silent, that silence will be construed as acceptance of all the bigotry, corruption and evils as perpetuated by the government of the day.
http://is.gd/g7VEek
Walla
Dead Cat Bounce????? is the correct link? for http://is.gd/g7VEek ??? What does it do?
It's from one of today's most seminal minds on economics, James.
Walla
Outstanding! I thought it was an application, but obviously a download link. Brain malfunctioned or more accurately, had not functioned for a while.
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