A wish for less politicking

A wish for less politicking
by marina mahathir
Sunday, 30 Dec 2018

I DOUBT if anyone has noticed but I’ve been away quite a bit in the last three months. “Away”, though, is a theoretical word in this age of social media. I may be physically absent, but it means very little when every morning, before I even have my first coffee, I get a barrage of messages telling me what is happening at home (various interpretations) and asking what I think of it all.

It’s partly because when I wake up, everyone else has been busy agitating and cogitating (in that order) for at least half a day already and therefore I have at least 15 issues and 30 different viewpoints on the same to consider.

I wonder if the PM feels like I do when this happens: Why not just go back to bed?

You’d think that social media was invented just for Malaysians, given the way we have taken to it. Judicious use of it, however, is not in our vocabulary.

Obviously, intelligence has its limits; or rather, social media does a good job of bamboozling people into believing their eyes and not their brains – if it’s on YouTube, it must be true.

So my pre-2019 policy is this: If I don’t comment on it, it means I don’t think much of it. Or at most, since I don’t want my friends particularly to make fools of themselves, I will post something that debunks whatever fantastic thing they just sent me. Hopefully it stops them from further spreading foolishness.

Which brings me to the cacophony that Malaysia’s democracy has become. People now seem to think that democracy means that you can say what you want, the louder the better.

Taking a digital leaf from the Internet, people now know how to use keywords so that what they say comes up first on Google and they can get their foot in first, so to speak. Often, it’s also their feet in their mouths.

Let me state here that I totally and completely believe in the freedom of expression and speech. Which means that everyone has a right to express their opinion on anything they want, as long as they are not inciting hate towards anyone. (More on this later.)

But it would be really nice if people used their freedom to express intelligent speech rather than the drivel that we are subjected to every day – everything from wild claims about why people are having lunch with certain people, to pronouncements about how allowing children to get married is a good thing and therefore allowing them to have legitimate sex, while at the same time declaring that sex education is bad because it causes people to run out and nuzzle each other or worse.

Mind you, the fact that this doesn’t gel with the number of people actually caught doing more than nuzzling and then being arrested for underage canoodling does not seem to matter to these people.

Even worse are those who fail to exhibit the slightest ounce of empathy with or sympathy for others who have had to suffer natural disasters that, unfortunately, their natural geographical locations make them vulnerable to.

When terrible tsunamis have killed or made homeless thousands in nearby Indonesia – that land that lies on the Ring of Fire with so many active volcanoes – people with not a shred of compassion in their hearts fill the need to declare these disasters the result of immoral activities and therefore a warning to the rest of us to be good and simply pray for our own salvation.

When disasters, debatably natural, occur in their own backyards, those are then pronounced NOT a result of moral decline. Only other people are morally wanting and therefore have God’s wrath visited upon them, WE are constantly pure and blessed. Despite high rates of poverty, unemployment, drug use, HIV, and children given away in marriage. If one were so blessed, you would think that would be a blissful place to live in, where no one needs to travel far to find jobs.

Then there are those who, sitting in their cosy homes, sipping their cups of tea, tap out hate on their news feeds, as if this is their mission in life to gain enough points on their Touch ’n Go cards to heaven’s gates. So what if some people, after reading their exhortations, think it amusing to go out and beat someone to death because they are different and therefore not quite human?

There’s a Malay saying about throwing a stone and then hiding your hand behind your back. That’s what these calls of hate on social media are. They can say that they are only expressing their opinion and are not actually responsible for the actual beating. Donald Trump uses that excuse too every time one of his white supremacist supporters beats or kills a black person.

If we insist on the rule of law, then nobody can beat anyone else without suffering the full brunt of the law. Otherwise, why have laws against such violence at all?

But more than that, we need very clear communication from the government that such violence is unacceptable, regardless of whether you approve or disapprove of someone’s lifestyle, looks, sexuality or national origin. At the very least, Article 8 should be taught in schools: everyone, no exceptions, is equal under the law.

Perhaps the one thing we should wish for in 2019 is not just a freer media but one that is held to higher standards. This is where citizen journalism, where people report what they saw and heard, is important to complement what we read in the media, especially the mainstream media.

News needs to be filtered for political bias, and sometimes even our own biases. When sound bites are picked out over substance, we need to switch our sceptical buttons on.

Finally, in 2019, I think what I, and hopefully most citizens, wish for is an end to politicking. There are people who cannot seem to help airing all their domestic troubles in public until we are all bored or, worse, nauseated by it all.

Can’t they just get on with work, please? Aren’t there other issues to deal with that affect a great many people than whether you’ve got a position or not? Doesn’t everyone have a role in making Malaysia Baru the dream nation that we voted for?

I’d really like to see the Cabinet speak as one, or at least coordinate their communications. Nothing is more confusing and annoying than to hear different ministers saying different things. Some of them really need a good communications person to advise them on optics if nothing else.

Having said that, while we have an imperfect government that’s still finding its way in this new environment, I would still say this: I prefer this current situation than anything this time last year when we were collectively depressed and feeling hopeless.

As flawed as our leaders may be right now, I have no wish to go back to the days of repression, unbridled greed and corruption of the previous regime.

We used our power to change, it’s now our duty to keep our new leaders on the straight and narrow. Not by constantly sniping but with substantive and constructive criticism.

And with that, have a Happy New Year everyone!

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On our own merit

On our own merit
By Marina Mahathir
Sunday, 2 Dec 2018

WHEN I was admitted to a local boarding school as a teenager many aeons ago, I had the misfortune of arriving at school late by two weeks.

The misfortune was mine in several ways. One was that the reason for my delayed entry was an operation I needed to remove an ovarian cyst.

The second I only realised when I finally arrived at school: everyone knew who I was and why I was late.

Perhaps there was a reason why I was singled out for mention at assemblies.

At the time, in the early seventies, my father had gained some public notoriety as the man who defied his leader.

In those days, while this called for disciplinary action, it did not lead to the sort of punitive action and ostracisation that we saw in recent years towards those not toeing the line. Whatever it was, by the time I got to school, I was already known as the daughter of the Defying Man.

Some may see that as a celebratory reception and to be fair, there were a lot of my new friends who were extremely kind to me.

But there were a few who perceived my being there as some sort of affront.

To get into that elite boarding school, you had to excel in your exams and get a certain minimum grade. I qualified well enough.

But there were some who suspected that I was there only because I was the daughter of a famous man, that I could not possibly be smart enough to gain entry were it not for my family connection.

For the two years I was there, I was often reminded that I was not good enough to call myself a pupil of that school.

Students were admitted entirely on merit and therefore they came from many different backgrounds, from the daughters of farmers to the daughters of royalty.

Performance in class was all that mattered; it was totally a meritocracy.

But for some reason there were those who didn’t believe I deserved to be there.

Just before our major exams, the one that would determine our future, one even said to me that she was “worried” for me, afraid that I would not have what it takes to get through them.

I was recalling those times recently, when it was so frustrating to have people think I had an easy pass because of familial connections when I knew that I was no less deserving academically than anyone else.

And I wondered if, in the competitive world out there, anyone else felt equally patronised because some people thought they didn’t really measure up to the requirements of their field.

I am wondering about all those smart Malay kids out there who have had to put up with being thought stupid because their race gave them special privileges.

Undoubtedly there are many who need a leg up in order to give them opportunities and place them on an equal footing as anyone else.

But with so much abuse over the years, where the undeserving have gotten into universities and jobs just because of their genetic make-up and who they knew, where does that leave all those who are actually smart and work hard to get where they are?

I have met so many young Malays who are very good at their studies or their jobs.

More importantly, they are thinking individuals who have very progressive views of the world. But I wonder if the abuses of affirmative action have had a negative impact on them too, especially when they live and work in Malaysia.

Did they have to face the same sort of condescension that I had to face when people thought I didn’t deserve to be in that elite school?

This is the problem when we have policies that are based entirely on race, and where we allow their easy abuse by loosening the rules and regulations.

I have no problem with affirmative action at all because I do think that there are groups of people who need it in order to be able to compete on a level playing field.

But the operative word here is “compete”, not given a gilded shoehorn into education or jobs based entirely on what your DNA is.

We all cry foul when due to the actions of a few, all Muslims are regarded as potential terrorists. But a similar stereotyping occurs when affirmative action policies are abused and the undeserving are given entitlements they should not get: all Malays are deemed also undeserving.

Nobody is seen as actually smart enough to enter university or get the top job, it’s only because they are Malay and/or knew somebody.

Women in particular should recognise this phenomenon. We are rarely thought smart or deserving enough to get the jobs and positions we apply for. Indeed, we are often discouraged from even thinking of applying.

Yet when there are attempts at affirmative action for women in the form of quotas, there are cries of “we only select based on meritocracy, not gender”, sometimes from women themselves.

Many older successful women are afraid that if we have quotas for them, they will have to continually live in a hostile environment where scorn is constantly heaped on their abilities.

But the truth is that proponents of quotas, like me, are not saying that we should choose just any woman to sit on boards, the Cabinet or other positions.

We are saying open the spaces for deserving women, based on their merits, because there are plenty of them out there, if only you would care to look.

By the same token then, Malays who have any pride in their own intellectual capacities and abilities should be just as resentful as those women who dislike quotas.

They should want to be judged on how well they do their jobs, not how well they represent affirmative action.

In our last government, Malays more than fulfilled their quota in politics. But they then did an abysmal job of helping their own people, apart from the ones who polished their behinds every day.

It is supremely ironic that those very same people are now demanding that the quotas they abused should be upheld forever.

It’s time really for the many intelligent progressive Malays to start claiming their right to be judged on their own abilities, to be considered well deserving of whatever achievements they have gained in life by their own efforts.

It’s high time that they pushed back at the inevitable patronising and – let’s call it what it is – racism that arises from a reaction to policies that hand over on a platter all sorts of benefits simply because they happened to be born to Malay parents.

We talk about maruah or dignity of our people all the time. But after the colossal thievery that our own people have inflicted on us, dignity can only be regained through hard work and the determination to do better, to show that we can stand with anyone in the world on our own merits.

That’s the only way for us to gain respect from everyone else.

And indeed, the only way we can respect ourselves.

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