Not the superlative we want

Not the superlative we want

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 25 Apr 2021

WHILE our government tries to tell us that we’re on the up and up despite having no money, in one area at least we’ve taken a deep plunge. We’ve managed to dive 18 places in the World Press Freedom Index 2021 to the 199th spot, an “astonishing fall, ” according to Reporters Sans Frontieres who does the ranking every year. We may love superlatives in our country but achieving the biggest fall of any of the 180 countries in the index should probably not go into the Malaysian Book of Records.

Nobody with any common sense will be surprised of course that our nose-dive happens to coincide with the change in government last February. Not two years before that, Malaysians woke up with a new sense of freedom. Reporters suddenly looked excited about delivering the news because they were no longer constrained. People were tuning in to TV news programmes and talk shows again because they finally felt they were getting something worthwhile from them, instead of the barely hidden propaganda previously.

So, we rose in the press freedom ranks, not to astronomical levels, since we still had certain laws hanging over our heads that the government then had promised to repeal. None of that had time to happen before a whole new set of politicians decided to swoop in and take over.

And then there was Covid. The greatest public health emergency in a century swept every single country and has now infected an astounding 141 million people and killed more than three million. Our contribution has not been too bad, at 377,000 infections and 1386 dead, if we’re looking at it from the point of view of the United States. For those of us actually living in Malaysia however, it’s been an unmitigated disaster.

There’s no need to reiterate how much suffering the pandemic has caused, not just by those who have been infected and lost their lives or those of their loved ones but also by those whose livelihoods disappeared almost overnight. Alongside the virus pandemic, other pandemics have emerged including the mental health one, the domestic violence one and not to forget, the misinformation one. In the first half of 2020, the Health Ministry recorded 465 cases of attempted suicide. Malaysians are depressed because they are worried after losing their jobs and incomes, but there just aren’t enough counsellors and psychiatrists to help them manage these emotional crises.

Do we get any empathy though? Instead, we get scolded every day for not following the SOPs in speeches, in the media and even via SMS.

Harsh penalties are imposed on those who have violated them, a necessary measure if only they weren’t so selectively imposed. My eyebrows were raised at a headline that said a honeymooning couple were fined for lying about the reason why they crossed state lines despite the ban on interstate travel. They turned out to be some unknown newlyweds, not famous ones who have yet to be charged with anything.

These are the sorts of inequalities that are making ordinary people totally fed-up. You would think after innumerable cases of some people being given special treatment despite obvious and major violations of SOPs, and the tremendous clapping-back that the public has given, the government would be chastened and at least make an attempt at fairness. But no, they continue ignoring the swelling tides of dissatisfaction.

I’m amazed at how people still are able to show their dissent despite the increasingly narrow space for anyone to voice it. After a judge decided that Malaysiakini should be censured because its readers made comment the government doesn’t like, we can almost give up hope on ever having any freedom to speak or express ourselves, despite these being Constitutional rights. How not to get a chill down the spine when the judgment leaves media at risk of gigantic fines or jail if someone decides to deliberately leave a provocative comment on their website? It doesn’t even matter if the comment was immediately taken down. What a great way to get rid of pesky news sites that constantly snipe at the government.

Yet Malaysians don’t give up hope. They continue to say their piece, through cartoons, on social media and even through the courts. The Emergency Ordinance, that shameful act of suspending Parliament under the weakest of excuses, is meeting resistance from all right-minded citizens. With EMCOs, MCOs and clusters being announced every day and numbers of infections rising, who truly believes that the Emergency is meant to manage the pandemic? Perhaps only the tiny cluster that will benefit from it.

Our leaders like to rail against “fake news”, even enacting a law against it under the Emergency ordinance. This is exactly what is making us slide to the bottom of the World Press Freedom Index. But you have to wonder who is delivering the untruthful news when an Emergency is passed ostensibly to manage the pandemic, yet the numbers have been continually rising?

Marina Mahathir is wondering if the endless statistics thrown at us each day is meant to numb us, rather than make us understand numbers. The views expressed here are solely her own.

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Asian hate on the rise

Asian hate on the rise

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 28 Mar 2021

I LIKE to be rational when I read the news. I know what it’s like to read about something horrible happening in a particular country and imagine that the entire country is aflame.

When we read news about civil wars and violence in a country, most of us tend to neglect to look at maps to see where exactly these things are happening. In some cases, the conflict is happening in a particular part of that state and not where you would normally visit. This was true of the conflict in Sri Lanka decades ago that was confined mostly in the north, or in Nigeria where the Boko Haram are running rampage also in the north.

Even when there is no conflict, news about a natural disaster, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, can put people off going to that country. When Fukushima in Japan was struck by an earthquake in 2011, tourists shied away from visiting a country that is normally one of the safest in the world, for fear they would be contaminated by radiation from the damaged nuclear power plant in that city. Most of the former Soviet Union is safe but I still don’t understand why there are tours to the Cher-nobyl nuclear disaster area in the Ukraine.

The point I’m making is that people read the news and do not often get a sense of perspective. News tends to highlight the worst things that happen, and the effect is to scare people by making them assume that disasters engulf an entire country, or that one person represents an entire community.

Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic cannot be minimised in any way – it is literally everywhere and the only way to contain it is to stop people’s mobility. If we don’t move, we won’t spread it.

But it is the randomness of events that most scares us, especially when they’re violent, human-made acts that are seemingly impossible to predict. You happen to be walking on a city street and airplanes crash into a tower above you. Or you’re praying in a mosque and a shooter comes in and fires away at the congregation. Or worse, your children are at a school and someone comes in with an automatic rifle.

Lately we have watched in horror at yet more mass shootings in the United States, an almost weekly event. What has caused a lot of anguished talk is the fact that in the killings in Atlanta, Georgia, six of the seven victims were Asian women. Racism and misogyny seem to have intersected to fatal effect.

The United States is perhaps the one country these days where it is difficult to get a sense of perspective. We don’t feel like going to America these days for many reasons.

Firstly, the insane and easy availability of guns there, especially the sort of weapons that soldiers normally use in wars to kill as many people as possible. The other reason is the surge in violence against people of Asian descent.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, various NGOs have counted more that 3,700 cases of abuse and harassment against Asian-Americans, especially people who are less able to defend themselves, like the old and women and children. Before last week, there were two deaths of old men caused by such attacks. Now the number of fatalities has increased substantially, and the worry is that there will be more.

What a lot of commentators have noted is that it is no coincidence that the surge in attacks have followed in the wake of the pandemic. They point to former president Donald Trump calling the coronavirus the “China virus” and “Kung flu” as setting the tone for discriminatory attitudes towards Asian-Americans.

Words matter, especially in a political environment that was particularly nativist, that sought to blame the Other, whether black, Muslim or foreign, for everything that is wrong with society. In their blinkered way, white supremacists, like all supremacists, think that everything will be perfect if only everyone in their country looked like them.

While we are busy sympathising with Asian-Americans for the horrible things that are happening to them, we should perhaps also reflect on our own attitudes towards the Other, whether citizens or not. Recently there was a complaint about Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka’s use of the word “keli**” in their dictionary to describe a tambi, a young man of Indian origin. It is astounding that Dewan Bahasa did not pick up on the sensitivity of the word.

But the word is not uncommon. We talk about other communities in our everyday lives using all types of derogatory words. Do we stereotype people freely and then excuse ourselves by saying we were only joking?

As much as we rightfully bemoan what is happening in the United States, it might help to remember that we are not immune from the same sort of racism and misogyny in Malaysia. Never mind what we say and do to fellow citizens, we also need to be mindful of the foreigners who live among us as workers and refugees.

There has been an uptick of discriminatory language in the media about foreign workers and refugees in Malaysia, people who are the least protected by our law enforcers.

Once we blamed them for a surge in petty crimes. Now we blame them for the pandemic despite the fact that fewer foreigners are infected by the coronavirus than are Malaysians. When they are infected, the fault is often ours because of conditions in factories and detention centres where physical distancing is simply not possible.

So lowly do we think of poor, dark-skinned foreigners, as opposed to wealthy white ones, that when our government sent over 1,000 refugees back to their country of origin that had been taken over by a military coup, there was barely a word of protest from anyone (except for a few NGOs who work with refugees). We really need some self-reflection on our own hypocrisy.

By all means, sympathise with Americans of Asian origin and pray hard that no Malaysian currently in the United States, especially those who could be mistaken for mainland Chinese, would ever have to suffer any of that violence. But while we empathise, we should also be cleansing ourselves of the same impulses to see those different from us as the Other and blame them for all our troubles.

We should call out those of our Trump-like leaders who create the sort of enabling atmosphere that leads to discrimination. We may not have as many guns floating around as they do in the United States, but the bullets of hate remain the same and are just as painful.

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Cake for some, kuih for others

 Cake for some, kuih for others

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 28 Feb 2021

TOLD that the peasants were starving, Marie-Antoinette, the wife of King Louis XVI of France, was reported to have said “Let them eat cake”. Historians have since disputed that the queen ever said any such thing but the phrase has remained in our lexicon as shorthand for an upper class that is oblivious and uncaring about the plight of the poor.

We’ve seen a lot of let-them-eat-cakeism lately within our shores. Beginning with the minister who so blithely went abroad on holiday with his family and then did not have to quarantine when he came home. Meanwhile, ordinary people could barely poke their noses out of their front yards without attracting a thousand-ringgit fine. A decision not to charge him with ignoring the quarantine was made because he was “not issued a home surveillance or observation order by the Health Ministry”. Which makes me think that whoever it was who was responsible should have been censured for being negligent. After all, although he was swabbed at the airport, there is such a thing as a false negative test result.

The National Security Council in its increasingly baffling wisdom has decided that individuals who violate the SOP must pay a fine of RM10,000. A great way to fill jails.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are increasingly frustrated at not only being unable to travel but having to calculate the maze of quarantine rules both abroad and back home before we can make any plans. A disincentive like no other.

Quarantine has been recommended as a way of isolating a person who has been potentially exposed to the virus until they can be declared Covid-19-free, a process that takes at least 10 days. So many returnees from abroad have had to endure those days in one room, unable to get any fresh air, or have any human interaction, and all at their own expense. The rules have applied to everyone, supposedly regardless of their station in life. People who have been found Covid-19-positive have been carted off to quarantine stations, to live among other asymptomatic Covid-19-positive people, sleep on bunk beds, eat whatever is served and find ways to stave off boredom, for an entire fortnight. Again, no quarter is given to social status; it is, in theory, an equal opportunity quarantine.

Yet here too let-them-eat-cake-ism is at play. No politician has ever been subjected to such treatment, although if they had, they might have gained a whole warehouse-full of new voters. Even when they returned from Sabah where the pandemic was raging, they were allowed to roam around regardless. One person, who had so blithely dropped in on so many spots around the country you would think he had never heard the word “pandemic”, then turned out to be positive. There must be a lot of people who felt very aggrieved that they had to be tested in his and his colleagues’ wake.

After months of grousing from the general populace, who might be inclined to remember these incidents the next time a general election comes round, some concession to rakyatism was proffered. Cabinet ministers who travelled abroad for work need to be put under observation for three days or be placed under supervision until they are “no longer a danger to the public”. Such are the scraps we are thrown, Marie Antoinette. Not only do they get to be observed for less than half the time the rest of us must, but they also get to do it at home where they can sleep in their own beds and get fed food made by their beloved’s own hands. I would suggest that these people are always a danger to the public and therefore have to be constantly supervised, preferably with electric prods.

Not that within our borders keeps anyone away from the cake either. While some are merrily feasting and then trying to exercise the fat away with more friends than they should have in defiance of the SOP that is being used to collect hefty fines, others have used the time to starve themselves and then reward their new forms with a designer wardrobe. This achievement naturally had to be recorded for posterity with professional stylists, makeup artists and photographers. Perhaps not eating could have made them more empathetic with those low-

income families who are also starving because they can’t afford to buy food any longer. A Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund) study of 500 of Kuala Lumpur’s urban poor found that one in two families are in absolute poverty and 37% struggle to purchase adequate food for their families. It added, “female- headed households were especially disadvantaged at the outset of the crisis, and now appear to be recovering more slowly and remain more at risk of backsliding than other households”.

Also, “the high burden of care in female-headed households manifests itself in terms of higher rates of unemployment and higher rates of dependence on insecure self-employment. As a result, these families appear to be struggling more than others to meet their basic needs.” But they can always eat kuih.

Our leaders are constantly complaining that we the people are simply refusing to obey the rules they have set down. But then we look up to them as role models. Under the mistaken notion that Article 8 of our Federal Constitution really means what it says, that everyone is equal under the law, we put our trust in them. Imagine our puzzlement when critical comments about the judiciary made by a few readers, quickly deleted, were cited as contempt of court and their online host fined half a million ringgit. Yet when a crystal-clear court order to stay the deportation of more than 1,000 Myanmarese migrants back to a regime we supposedly don’t recognise was defied, there was no hue and cry. As much as some Malaysians, worried about the loss of their toilet-cleaning opportunities to these foreigners, may have cheered these deportations, what should have really irked them was the fact that “contempt of court” is only a weapon to be wielded against those of us who don’t have YB in front of our names. But these are the sorts of details we like to gloss over, much to the gratification of our overlords.

In the past year as this pandemic has come down on most people like a sludge heap, burying many in its path, there are the select few who are sitting nicely in their plush homes sipping tea, comforted by the knowledge that their cake shops will never close. Those who have to settle for the crumbs, though, are watching and hopefully remembering.

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All I want for 2021 is...

All I want for 2021 is...

By MARINA MAHATHIR
MUSINGS

Sunday, 27 Dec 2020

The year 2020 that we had looked forward to for so long turned out to be such a wreck of a year that some people are seriously talking about erasing it from their lives.

FOR some weeks now I have felt a quickening of the heartbeat and an electric pulse that goes up my arms through my nerves as if someone attached me to a power plug and left the switch on. It is literally unnerving because for the longest time I didn’t know why I was feeling like this, and no amount of controlled breathing could calm it.

Then I realise that it’s anxiety. Not the garden-variety type I might get before I have to give a talk but a real ongoing nerve-rattling sense of unease that I can’t seem to dissipate despite whatever measures I might take to alleviate it.

And I know where it comes from. It’s this year 2020, the year we looked forward to for so long because we expected it to be a transformative one, where we move from being a still-developing country through some magic portal to become one where we can stand shoulder to shoulder with some of those advanced ones. But 2020 has been such a wreck of a year that some people are seriously talking about erasing it from their lives, not even counting it as a year in their history. Even though this year has had more impact on us than any year in memory.

It is partly this gruesome pandemic that has devastated people’s lives all over the world. If a year ago someone said there would come a time when we would not be able to travel and high-flying jet pilots would now become Grab drivers, we would have laughed. But these days we are seeing the most extraordinary measures people are taking just to survive. On the one hand, it’s been miraculous to see the creativity and resilience of the human spirit. On the other hand, why did it have to come to this for us to see it?

I think what’s making me – and probably a lot of people – nervous is the sheer uncertainty of everything. While I’m not one to plan anything too far ahead of time, it’s the inability to plan anything at all that puts my nerves on edge.

I don’t know, for instance, with all these constantly-changing border restrictions, when I will see my daughter who’s studying overseas in real life again, rather than just on video calls. (Having said that, thank God we live in the era of video calls.) My work has pivoted online so much this year until, like many work-from-homers, I can’t bear to do another Zoom meeting. I’m hoping that once the vaccine becomes widely available, we can return to face-to-face meetings when we can focus more on the work at hand without being distracted by everything we have to do at home.

Since we’re always making wishes for the new year, these are some of the things I wish for in 2021:

1. An end to this global pandemic and the suffering it has wrought, and well-thought-out solutions to mitigate these human disasters.

2. A return to a kinder, gentler world where people talk to, rather than fight, each other.

3. The replacement of all the incompetents in our current government. Surely we deserve better.

4. Learning the lessons of Covid-19, especially how injustices and inequalities have been brought to light and exacerbated by a tiny virus.

5. More brainpower put to mitigating those same injustices and inequalities, especially for those who have the least, including migrant workers and refugees. Otherwise we should stop claiming we’re all part of one human family.

6. A lot of self-reflection on how ugly we, as a society, have become. We’re more xenophobic, more selfish and, incredibly, proud of it. Yet we complain when other countries are the same towards us.

7. More time, energy and thought spent on the big issues in life rather than the small things that we have no business interfering in, especially people’s personal lives.

8. Rethink how we spend our consumption and what we actually need in our lives.

9. Become more aware of what some use as excuses to justify further repression of our rights. It’s been so easy to use our fear of Covid-19 to justify the whittling away of democracy, leaving some people unrepresented.

10. Keep calling out the double standards used on ordinary people and politicians when it comes to the so-called justice system. And remember them when it comes time to vote.

11. That those awaiting trials for corruption all get found guilty and get very long jail times and pay ginormous fines.

12. And indeed, crack down on those who profit off people’s religiosity. In fact, let’s just crack down on hypocrisy.

13. That Malaysian women get recognition as equal citizens and are able to confer their citizenship on their children and there’s an end to insulting excuses for not doing this.

14. That we get a government that thinks of each one of us as equal, and not some more equal than others, that all of us deserve attention and the protection of our rights.

15. That more young people will come to the fore and lead us, because, frankly, I’m exhausted and it’s their time.

Sorry if I can’t give you more cheery wishes, folks, but still I wish you all happy holidays and a 2021 that is brighter, happier and safer than what we’ve been through this year.

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Piecemeal responses not helping our vulnerable

Piecemeal responses not helping our vulnerable
By MARINA MAHATHIR
MUSINGS
Sunday, 29 Nov 2020

A report from the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) on what school shutdowns will do to children’s education had some alarming things to say. Published in May this year, among other things it warned that “evidence for unexpected temporary school closures and reduced instruction time suggests that school closures will reduce educational achievement both in the short and long term”.

It also added that children from disadvantaged backgrounds “are likely to be affected more than others by school closures, with fewer family resources and less access to online learning resources to offset lost instruction time”.

I am amazed that the CEP commissioned such a report so early in the pandemic, but that’s what a culture of intellectual curiosity does for you. Meanwhile I’m wondering whether there is anything similar that examines the impact of school closures in our country.

I’ve only managed to find a report done by Unicef Malaysia that highlighted three very stark numbers: youth unemployment is likely to rise from the already high 11% in 2019, school closures affect some four million children and half a million children from low-income households have been deprived of the supplementary school meals programme that provides them with the nutrition they need for their growth.

We know that except for those parents who have already been homeschooling their children, it is really not easy to teach children at home. Even if you had all the books and equipment you need, teaching children their schoolwork takes a lot of patience and perseverance. And that is if you don’t have your own work and the housework to do as well.

What if you don’t have the devices such as laptops or iPads that you need so that children can follow their lessons online? In rich households switching to online learning should not be a problem. Not only do they have the means to follow school subjects online, but they have a wealth of other books and games to keep their brains stimulated.

It’s a different story in low-income households. A study involving more than 670,000 parents and 900,000 students in Malaysia found that about one-third do not own any devices at all. If they’re lucky, there’ll be at most one laptop to be shared by everyone.

Some families are so poor that the children have to wait until their father comes home from work to use his phone to look up their lessons. That is not always the solution either. As we also now famously know from a young girl in Sabah, having a device is one thing, connectivity is another thing altogether.

The assumption is of course that our teachers are geared up to provide lessons online at all.

The Education Ministry has provided guidelines to parents and teachers on this new form of school. But questions remain. Do teachers themselves have the means and devices to set up online lessons at all? After all they too have homes with children who need all their attention.

In the face of all this, with the current lockdowns continuing seemingly with no end in sight, it is hardly surprising that tensions are rising within the home. Parents are worried about their jobs and wondering if they will continue to have one into the new year.

Some have already lost their jobs and finding it difficult to pivot into other income-generating occupations.

With children constantly at home, bored and restless, is it any wonder that the parents’ patience is tried? The seemingly made-on-the-fly CMCO order restrictions often bring more hardship than help. A good example is the two-persons-per-car rule. It has created all sorts of problems for parents even with one child because they can never travel as a family anywhere, not even to hospital. Even the three-people-per-car rule makes no sense, from an infection control point of view, when they are all together at home anyway.

Due to all these restrictions and worries, domestic abuse has gone up, a phenomenon we have seen all over the world. Do we simply shrug our shoulders at it? We have to be more alert to protect victims and would-be victims who are inevitably women and children.

The Women, Family and Community Development Ministry needs to be more proactive in setting up systems to detect cases and provide help, in collaboration with NGOs. This is the time for new approaches to an old heightened problem, not denials.

The Education Ministry should also be concerned that whole
generations of children are going to be handicapped by their lost year of education.

How are they planning to remedy the situation?

Surely this is an urgent problem to address if we are to get back on our feet quickly once this pandemic is over.

We have always emphasised the importance of education for the country’s development. Why then is it that we hear so little from the Education Ministry of their plans? Is it enough to just budget for laptops now when children are unable to read?

Children are resilient but we still need to keep their brains stimulated. How are we to address that when there are so many unequal households, as evidenced by the number of B40s the government needs to subsidise? Where is the forward planning?

I’d suggest that temporary community schools in PPR flats be set up to give some class time to kids even if only two hours a day, taught by paid teachers (preferably those living in the same area). This would help not only to keep the children’s skills up, it would also occupy them for a while and provide some relief to their besieged parents. Even if it’s just playtime or storytelling, I believe it would help.

But schools should open soon with strict SOPs. New rules have to be devised to protect everyone. This is the time for innovative thinking.

The fallout from closing schools has an economic impact beyond that on our children. School canteen businesses and bus drivers are suffering just from the one act of closing schools. How many others are affected by this? Gardeners, cleaners, general workers?

Like many social issues, the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for whole-of-government responses, not piecemeal ones. All we are seeing these days are what looks like ad-hoc policies that seem short-termed in focus. Is that because our leaders don’t expect to stay long?

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