New resolutions for a new decade

New resolutions for a new decade
MUSINGS
Sunday, 29 Dec 2019
By Marina Mahathir

THE city fathers of Sabang in Aceh recently issued a ban on its local residents celebrating the New Year. Apparently, after 2,020 years, they’ve decided that such festivities are not in line with their local customs and traditions. However, they will still welcome tourists. Presumably not the celebratory type. A destination for the dour only.

On our very own eastern shores, a state mufti has declared that anyone who so much thinks of wishing anyone of another faith a Merry Christmas, Happy Deepavali or Happy Wesak Day is taking a giant step further away from heaven. The ladder up is steep and it’s so easy to slip and slide down a lot of rungs just by being beneficent to an infidel.

What strikes me most about these pronouncements, besides their intent on pouring cold water on anyone’s celebrations, is the sheer joylessness of it all. I picture some grumpy old men who have never had fun in their lives and are obsessed with spoiling everyone else’s.

Never mind that most people, regardless of their faith or station in life, have probably come to the end of the year mentally and physically exhausted and are looking forward to kicking back and hanging out for a few days before the grind resumes.

After all, many of us are not just sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking up spoilsport edicts but are actually trying to make a decent living or help others live a bit more comfortably.

Most of us are trying to keep body and soul together and have no time to think up schemes to suck the joy out of everyone’s lives, rather like a nasty vacuum cleaner that can’t rest until the last bit of so-called immorality is eliminated from this earth.

What is it about pleasure that sticks in these people’s craw so much? Or rather, what is it about other people’s joy that pushes that sharp stick up some people’s bottoms that they have to find ways to rain down unhappiness on everyone?

Is there a law somewhere which says that misery on earth is in inverse proportion to happiness in the hereafter? The more you suffer, the more points you earn towards the gates of that blissful place. Even if that were true, surely those who are ensuring that you have no laughter in your life are having the time of theirs.
By their own logic, this would be a bit like landing on a snake square and sliding down to its tail, forcing them to work even harder at sorrow to regain their place.

Unless they actually believe that their lives are even more agonising by making ours miserable and therefore, they are always ahead of us in the unhappiness stakes. You know, the old “this is hurting me than it hurts you” syndrome.

I suppose that is the way dictators, demagogues and despots work. They are convinced that they are doing us all a favour by keeping their people destitute. Smiles and laughter would be a sign of immorality, or worse, subversiveness.If people want to dance, ban it. If they want to sing, tell them it’s a sure ticket to hell. If they want to be neighbourly and greet friends of other faiths on their festivals, remind them that they will have to answer under the unrelenting sun of the Day of Reckoning why they bought that greeting card or sent over that jar of cookies. Beware!

To guarantee our virgins in paradise, not a body less than 72, we must never smile in this festering swamp that is the earth. For the unfortunate others who can only hope for golden umbrellas, just don’t complain about that pain in your heart, those bruises on your face or that broken arm. Comfort and safety are for the faithless, don’t you know? You owe it to yourself to endure. You’ll be rewarded later.So never mind those poor souls who have nothing to eat, who live in homes that flood every time it rains and whose kids go to leaking schools that teach them that the only way to get ahead in life is to make someone else’s life miserable. Hope for nothing in this existence and you’ll never be disappointed.

Those of us who bristle at these edicts also secretly wonder why these party poopers have no qualms about taking the day – sometimes several days – off during these heathen festivals. Isn’t not having to work a happy thing to do? Isn’t such joy subtracting a few steps along that highway to heaven? Isn’t it better to speed your way along by actually going to your cubicle on those festivals you keep tut-tutting about? Refusing to holiday along with everyone else would be the ultimate radical statement, a veritable vroom-vroom towards those virgins!

But instead, that “enforced” leave would be an opportunity to think of more ways to dump wet blankets on the populace. Merrymakers will be marked down! Point some pain at those panderers to paganism!

Let us fight back. Given that we are at the end of a decade and about to begin a new one, perhaps we should embark on some 10-year resolutions. I propose that we simply decide that we will find joy in every corner of our lives and ignore those who are intent on projecting their own despair onto us.

We will complain only when it’s warranted and not wallow in woefulness. We will do more to alleviate the unhappiness of others.

We will appreciate the beauty of nature and all that live in it. Most of all, we will sing, dance and laugh. Mostly because these days, those are revolutionary acts.

I hope you had a very Merry Christmas and wish you stomachs, pockets and hearts that are full in 2020. Happy New Year!

Marina Mahathir believes that smiling and laughing are acts of necessary resistance these days. The views expressed here are solely her own.

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Wishy-washy silence is not golden

Wishy-washy silence is not golden
MUSINGS
Sunday, 01 Dec 2019
By Marina Mahathir

THEY say that if you don’t come out strongly against something, it means you’re for it. Silence means acquiescence. It’s an affliction that particularly affects politicians who, ever wary of potential controversies, stay clear of taking unequivocal stands on most subjects.

So you have, to give an international example, a Jeremy Corbyn who won’t say he’s against Brexit. Which leaves us to speculate what he really thinks about it or whether he simply doesn’t want to agitate his pro-Brexit supporters.

Nearer home, we get the same sort of wishy-washyness from some of our politicians.

We thought the new Malaysia would be a dynamic and energetic one but yet there still is so much ambivalence in so many policies.

We thought a crowd pleaser would be major reforms of our education system but so far the so-called reforms have been superficial, involving shoes, writing and irrelevant languages.

So we’re still waiting on that one.

We have had people who have disappeared. This is by no means normal for our country.

Isn’t it a horrible thing for the families who are left wondering where their loved ones could be, whether in fact they’re still alive?

Why is there so little empathy for a wife who is suddenly husbandless, with no clue where he’s gone but only some suspicion that somebody took him.

Is it so hard to sympathise with that predicament, even when you can’t give any good news?

Are our tongues so heavy that we can’t express any solidarity with people who are suffering?

Even if it’s not from illness or loss, is it not possible to try and give some comforting words to people who have less?

Just the cost of living these days can bring enough misery for families, who are often left with nothing at the end of the month.

Can’t there be reassuring words, to be followed by actions of course, about lowering the cost of food, or of transportation. Talking about transportation, I was listening to a radio programme about the Malaysian so-called reluctance to use public transport. 

Apparently, we like the privacy of our own cars, to gather our thoughts, listen to news and music and therefore we’re not very inclined to use public transport because we have to share space with other people.

I understand all that although I was shocked to hear that Malaysians apparently have the most number of cars per capita in the world. Headphones though are a marvellous invention for use in public places. But place those individual luxuries against the cost of running a car, enduring traffic jams and looking for parking, and I think public transport becomes a viable alternative, just as it does in more advanced countries.

Funny that we have no qualms about using the Tube or buses in London, say, but not in KL. The reasons though are plenty.

Public transport over there is clean, efficient and well-organised. If you miss one train or bus, you know another one will arrive shortly. You can even track the arrival of the next bus.

What’s more, public transport there is not a class issue. It’s used by everybody regardless of their station in life, because it works.

But here, while cars still remain a symbol of upward mobility, there’ll always be a separation of people in our transport environment.

Ride-hailing cars evens it out somewhat but they still put cars on the roads. We need a more positive campaign to promote public transport and use technology to build a more efficient system.

So some sympathy for the average working person who has to spend a lot of money on transportation to work wouldn’t go amiss.

I also read somewhere that good public transport benefits poor people mostly because they often can’t afford to buy cars and all that goes with them, especially petrol.

So if you want to be a good government working for the poorest people, you’d have to invest in the best public transport system, because that’s the best way to get people to their workplaces.

If they can’t get to work, they can’t earn much money. If they can’t earn much, they’re forced to live far from their workplaces because that’s all they can afford.

But without good public transportation, they’ll spend most of their money and time trying to get to work. It’s a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.

But back to silence about issues potentially signalling agreement.

I am puzzled by the lack of will on eliminating child marriage.

Using the excuse of state reluctance to raise the age of marriage may be an excuse although a pretty poor one. But why can’t public figures make a stand about what they think of child marriage? Do they really think it’s OK?

Or it’s not OK but they cannot deal with bureaucracy? It’s really shameful to see the sheer reluctance to say outright that child marriage is wrong and harmful for our children. And I don’t even buy the excuse that it would lead to a high number of pregnancies and abandoned babies.

Marrying them young would still lead to pregnancies and not necessarily better care for those children because after all they’re being brought up by children.

There is a principle of allowing lesser harm if it averts a bigger one.

In this case, not allowing a child to get married is better than the long term harm of early marriage and early pregnancies.

But where our politicians are reluctant, the people are not.

It’s heartening to see a social media campaign begun by ordinary citizens calling on the states who have not raised the age of marriage to do so.

It should shame the states that are still recalcitrant unless they don’t want to listen to the people who voted them in. In which case they risk facing more Tanjung Piais.

Marina Mahathir sometimes wonders why people are so eager to marry children off, and yet when people do get married, still penalise them for having babies too soon after their weddings and label them illegitimate. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect the official stand of Sunday Star.

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