Hope in the new and young
MUSINGS
Sunday, 27 Sep 2020
By Marina Mahathir
IN a year of many disappointments it’s not often that you get two exciting developments happening in the same month.
One is the Sabah state election that should be over by the time you read this. Win or lose, they signal a new kind of politics in our poor beleaguered country, one that goes beyond the usual empty chatter about race and religion. It’s so nice to see a leader that, unlike some that come to mind, has not inhaled the toxins that usually pervade our political parties, despite having spent years in the peninsula.
His talk about unity, of everyone in this land, and not just unity among some people, is exactly what we need to hear in this polarised fractured world. Ordinary people are simply tired of listening to people fighting. We just want people who think of all of us as one unit, not different groups that need to be played off against one another.
I like to think that GE14 gave a lot of voters permission to not put up with rubbish anymore. Out of the many amusing videos coming out of Sabah, my favourite has to be the one where a group of women in traditional dress are confronting a campaigning politician with signs demanding to know what happened to the promises they made at the last election, none of which presumably were fulfilled. He was left speechless, not knowing what to say when accountability was demanded of him. And that is exactly what elections should be about, the Day of Accounting every five years or so.
The other exciting thing is the formation of a youth-led party. Anyone who watched the Digital Parliament a few months ago would have been impressed by the performance of the 222 young people who each digitally represented all the constituencies in our real Parliament.
If they didn’t, they are just sourpusses who know very well that the real MPs would not have fared well against their online counterparts. Almost every one of the young wakils were well-prepared, knew what they wanted to talk about and presented their points articulately and with confidence.
Some of them were only 15 years old but seemed far more mature than their real counterparts. No one called each other names, made dirty jokes or interrupted people just to stop them talking. And they had Speakers who gave each of them equal time.
Watching the young people of the Digital Parliament gave me hope that we can salvage this nation of ours so torn asunder by toxic politics. They have shown that the young have much to contribute to nation-building and should not be insulted and put down as little kids fooling around while the adults lead.
Where has this so-called adult leadership actually gotten us? Maybe we should re-define what it means to be a grownup. After all, so many of them have reduced parliamentary sessions to mere playground gamesmanship.
The thing is no matter how much you shout about racial or religious rights, it’s not going to get anyone a job besides the temporary one of a rent-a-mob, with a T-shirt thrown in. You can’t actually feed your baby with it.
Even if you do make it to the big time, with your own chauffeur, Mercedes and starlet wife, you’ll still be caught out every time you open your mouth. With people having to work from home, it’s easy-peasy to look up the college you purportedly attended to see if it really exists on terra firma or merely in the smoke-filled reaches of your mind.
Young people want you to show them the money. Not outright cash of course in the manner you’ve grown accustomed to but in sustainable honestly-earned form.
In other words, they want the jobs that let them live a decent life, hopefully better than their parents’, with some measure of freedom to do what they like.
Just look at Thailand where young people are showing their stuff, coming out in droves to demand a better government than what they have now. It’s moving because it is so dangerous. But they have the numbers and they have adult support. I’d venture that their parents are inspired by their courage.
Indeed, courage is what is sadly lacking in our country. The courage to do and say what is right, not what is expedient. Or perhaps, the right things are what is expedient because people are, like those women in Sabah, just tired of hearing empty platitudes once every few years, words said for effect and nothing else.
If someone says we’ll all have to work hard together to make things better, that is more real than saying, “Here’s some money, now go and vote for me.” I might be able to buy a chicken with it this week while you’re campaigning but not next week after you’ve lost.
So nothing is more exciting to me than to see young people – truly young people – take the lead because I want to retire into old-fogeyness and let someone else worry about the state of things. Sure, they’ll make some mistakes but that’s part of life. After all we’ve already made a lot and didn’t always learn from them.
That’s not to say that our young should learn their way through the old system of doing things. They should in fact be tearing down the infrastructure that’s been in place and that’s obviously rotting and about to break down.
When we mean new and young, we mean new and young, especially given that the Covid-19 pandemic has upended everything. Nothing will go back to “normal”. Nor should they, because “normal” is what got us to where we are.
Talking about political gamesmanship, because I have an early deadline, I can’t comment on what’s going to happen by Sunday. But I suspect, it’ll be not much.
