A knee-jerk response, again

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday May 7, 2008
A knee-jerk response, again
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR


The world is too dangerous, therefore women should be kept at home to be safe. Such logic smacks of a patriarchal attitude that is so prevalent in our society; that women cannot fend for themselves and need to be ‘protected’.

IN MY last column I wrote about the need to revamp entire political structures to incorporate more women into decision-making structures. There was absolutely no reaction whatsoever. It might have been too shocking a suggestion, despite the fact that half of our population are women.

The idea of putting women in true leadership positions, where they lead all Malaysians, not just women, must have seemed too radical to even contemplate.

This week we find ourselves with the very reason why this must happen.

In response to the recent spate of young women being caught overseas for smuggling drugs, the Foreign Minister, along with the Home Minister, intended to propose to the Cabinet that all women travelling alone must get their families’ consent.

(The Foreign Minister subsequently clarified the proposal was only meant for those below 21 years old. However, the Prime Minister has shot the idea down. – Editor)

It is extremely revealing that neither minister saw fit to consult the Women, Family and Community Development Minister on this issue.

Is this because they forgot there is such a minister? Do they view the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry as some junior inconsequential ministry that cannot make “important” decisions like this? Small wonder women have not gotten very far at all.

This “brilliant” proposal requiring women travelling alone to get consent before they do so brings up many questions.

Say this was, by the biggest stretch of the imagination, an appropriate thing to do, how would anyone implement it? Would Immigration officers be required to check that each young woman travelling has a letter of consent?

With our new smart passports, we don’t even talk to any Immigration officer. Will we now see women forced to forgo the machines and queue up instead?

At heart it smacks of a patriarchal attitude that is so prevalent in our society; that women cannot fend for themselves and need to be “protected”. But that protection entails curbing women’s freedom for “their own good”.

That was exactly the logic the Taliban used to keep women at home. The world is just too dangerous. Therefore women should be kept at home to be safe, even though this curbs their access to education, employment and even healthcare.

It’s the same mentality that says that women should be told to cover up so that they won’t get raped, or not carry handbags so that those won’t be snatched. Or that books should be banned so that people don’t get ideas that “may” be dangerous.

It’s a mentality that accepts that the world is a bad place and, worse still, nothing can be done about it. Criminals roam free so people must curb their own freedoms so that they would never get in the way of these bad people. Men are inclined to rape, so women must never provoke them.

Funnily enough, nobody suggests that for the protection of women, men should be locked up since they make up the majority of rapists, bag snatchers, thieves and murderers. This is a real indictment of the police since we seem to accept that they are incapable of doing their jobs.

This mentality pervades all levels of society in every way. We have so little confidence in our own people that we imagine that at the slightest opportunity, they will, in a very childlike way, become influenced.

I attended a forum on the banning of books and heard one person say that we should not allow certain books to be sold because our children might read them.

I had to wonder whether he meant orphaned children with no parents or any responsible adult to guide them or all children. Why do we forget about our own responsibilities to teach our children the right values so that they can judge for themselves?

Sometimes I think we don’t want to do the right thing because it is too hard. Educating people to be more savvy about the people they meet, to be more alert when they travel, to be more critical about what they read are all the tools we need to protect our people, including women and children.

But it’s not easy and it takes time before we see the results. Still, that doesn’t mean we should not do it. Just because we still have car accidents does not mean we should stop road safety campaigns; nor should we ban cars.

Our officials can avoid these types of silly proposals if only they thought of consulting people and getting realistic feedback.

They should consult a wide range of people and then weigh what should be done. They should look at empirical data and see which groups of people are particularly vulnerable. Then, and only then, should they respond.

If an alarming number of women are being duped into criminal activity, then we should be educating women about it with suggestions on how to avoid this folly. Sensational stories in the newspapers alone won’t do it.

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Glass ceilings of reinforced concrete

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday April 23, 2008
Glass ceilings of reinforced concrete
COMMENT
By MARINA MAHATHIR


Separation by gender and age are these days outdated to say the least. It leads to ghettoizing of concerns, rather than mainstreaming them.

GIVEN the grumbling and rumbling among many women in the last general election about the number of female candidates, perhaps it is now time to think in ways more in keeping with the times.

The fact remains that while there are separated groups of people representing different interests in the main political parties in government, there can never be a truly fair way of selecting candidates.

In many countries in the world these days, political parties are not, like they are in some of ours, divided into Main, Wanita and Youth divisions. Nor are these divisions even further divided into Puteri and Putera divisions.

These separations by gender and age are these days outdated to say the least. It leads to ghettoizing of concerns, rather than mainstreaming them.

For instance, as long as women’s concerns are debated only within Wanita circles, they will remain forever isolated and marginalised. Rarely will they become mainstreamed in debates in the main body of the party.

That special slots have to be given to these concerns in this day and age smacks of condescension, as if women’s issues are unimportant and not also national concerns.

The way it currently works is that women are given seats on supreme councils only by virtue of holding a post within their own wings. Generally, that means they have to be heads of their wings. This means that the representation of women on supreme councils will never exceed two or three at best.

What this ensures is that these women will never feel able to voice out the issues that are important to their women constituents, even though women make up a substantial proportion of overall membership numbers.

When one is a minority on important decision-making bodies, one tends to be meek on gender issues because there is rarely much space allowed to discuss them.

The feeling is that one is entering a boys’ club and therefore must play by boys’ rules. And talking about the plight of women who are discriminated against in the courts by male judges, for instance, doesn’t play well in that club.

The solution would be to do away with these reserved spots for women heads and allow for any woman member to stand for elections for any post directly. Not only will this allow more talent into the pool but will also reflect a party more in sync with the world.

What’s more, because there are more women members, the chances of women winning these seats are higher. Even better, the men will also have to woo the women’s votes and therefore have to display some concern for women’s issues.

We should no longer tolerate the type of gender and age apartheid that occurs in our main political parties. The separation of members by age is even more laughable than the gender one, especially since definitions of youth are elastic to say the least.

While young people may need more experience to lead, that’s not to say that the young have no leadership qualities. And why not have a woman leading all the youth members? Or indeed, the entire party?

When our politicians interact with other politicians from elsewhere, they often find themselves facing very different set-ups. The male president of the party may find himself meeting with his counterpart from another country; but who may be female and young.

Does that make discussions any less important or different? If other people are putting their best people up front, why can’t we do the same? And who’s to say that our best leaders are necessarily men?

At the moment, the way our political parties are set up, they are not only unattractive to the young but also to the most dynamic types of women. We already have glass ceilings in the workplace, but in political parties the ceilings are made of reinforced concrete if you are female.

Just look at the recent discussions as to who might stand for presidential and vice-presidential posts. Not a single female name among them. Does it really say anywhere that women are excluded from these posts?

If our largest political parties truly want to reinvent themselves and attract the young, they have to re-look at their own structures.

They have to erase the lines that separate their members by gender and age and focus on talent. Only then will they bear some resemblance to real life, where every day women are breaking new ground in many different occupations.

We have women nowadays who are heading central banks, securities commissions and supervising the building of large buildings, leading men and women.

Yet, if they were members of these political parties, they can only lead their own sex and no more. How ironic!

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Living in denial

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday April 9, 2008
Living in denial
COMMENT
By MARINA MAHATHIR


Denial is a dangerous trait to have because it blinds us to problems we need to confront in order to solve them

ALL the years I spent working on the AIDS issue, one of the biggest problems we faced in many countries including our own was denial. When countries deny that they even had a problem, or when, if they had a problem, it was not big enough to warrant serious attention, then national responses have nowhere to begin.

Indeed many of the countries that have some of the worst epidemics today started off being in denial, and then had to face facts once they became literally “in their faces”.

Denial is a dangerous trait to have because it blinds us to problems we need to confront in order to solve them. We act as if everything is fine and dandy and there is no need to find creative solutions to anything.

As a result, the problems continue to fester until one day they burst out into the open. Just like the AIDS epidemic, by the time that happens, the problem is hard to contain anymore and people who need not have suffered, do.

Denial is often also the first response of people who have been told they have a grave, maybe fatal, illness. They can’t believe it is happening to them so they try and put it out of their minds and refuse to get treatment.

The subsequent delay thus results in their illness becoming more advanced and treatment becoming more difficult, even ineffective. Then there is no use for regrets and “if onlys”.

I read some of the statements made by some of our current leaders these days and it reminds me of those struggles to get governments to understand the AIDS problems.

People at the top presume to understand what people at the lowest strata of society experience even when they live vastly disparate lives. They believe that everyone’s experience is the same as theirs.

Thus when some people are happy they have gotten some high-salaried job, they believe that everyone else is happy too, quite forgetting that others did not get that same job.

They also think that when they ask people if they are happy, they are going to get a response that is wholly truthful. Why should anyone tell the truth to someone who so obviously has no empathy with him or her?

I cannot help but see symptoms of denial in some of the so-called analyses of the last elections’ results. There is no better indication of this than when blame is placed on individuals who do not agree with them, rather than on self-reflection.

The most courageous admission to make is “we screwed up” but deniers rarely ever do this. That’s also because denial is a form of cowardice.

To face problems squarely and to admit that you yourself may be at fault is courageous. To then deal with the problems realistically and intelligently takes even more courage.

And courage is exactly what we need right now, not the fear factor. Our people have shown what courage they have, by leaping into the unknown and voting in people whose abilities they only suspect but do not know for sure. They deserve in return to be treated with respect, to be led courageously.

I used to bemoan the constant sacrifice of realistic and correct policies on HIV on the altar of political expediency. Nobody had the courage to do the right thing because they thought it would cost them their popularity, especially at the polls. As if saving lives could ever be an unpopular thing to do.

I see the same thing happening with almost everything these days but most especially in the political field.

The difference is that the politically expedient thing to do is to take those steps out of denial. Instead we find denial after denial, blindness after wilful blindness, deafness after deepening deafness.

How nice to live in a world where we see nothing and hear nothing, where we live in splendid isolation. How comforting to see obvious losses as wins, to see obsequiousness as respect. If only all of us could live such cocooned lives.

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Diversity, not race, our strength

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.

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Wednesday March 26, 2008
Diversity, not race, our strength
Comment by MARINA MAHATHIR


I HAD two jaw dropping experiences this past week. The first was while viewing a video of an aspiring YB facing a group of citizens concerned about unfettered development in their area.

The potential YB not only refused to answer the questions directly but instead displayed a performance so outstandingly arrogant that you had to conclude that he did not really want to be elected. It was an abject lesson in how to lose an election.

Then I saw a report in a Chinese newspaper on how the newly appointed MB of Perak had stunned a Chinese crowd in Ipoh by speaking to them in Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Tamil, English and Malay.

It may well have been no more than words of greeting but still, the very idea of a Malay politician speaking to a Chinese audience in their own language and dialects is novelty enough these days to be impressive.

Our recent elections has been a jaw dropping experience overall. Perhaps that is only because we are not used to these things that we find them unusual and curious.

As with anything else, there may soon come a day when seeing politicians and other public figures “cross over” racial lines becomes something very normal and no longer anything to remark on.

Perhaps the day when vertical thinking along racial lines is nearer than we dreamt.

I had the opportunity to listen for the second time to Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault and Nissan, the other night on how diversity should be viewed as a strength.

He said he was impressed with Malaysia because it was obvious that our success comes from our natural ethnic diversity.

Coming from a diverse background himself and successfully managing two very different car companies with very different cultures, Ghosn knows what he is talking about.

The important thing, he said, is to acknowledge and respect people’s separate identities and view that as a strength that can be tapped for success. These days, smart global companies don’t impose one type of management style all over the world but adapt to each cultural situation.

If only he knew how hard it is to convince our own people of this. People in political power still think that championing racial rights is their only raison d’etr.

Yet the elections have shown that people vote across racial lines because they are more concerned about pressing issues that affect everyone. They thought that people who used the racial rights argument were waving an old tattered banner, out of a lack of ideas.

To be sure, some issues affect some communities more than others. But these are not genetic; they are related to the circumstances that some members of these communities find themselves in.

The challenge is to alter those circumstances in a way that the communities themselves can find their way out of these problems.

We yearn these days for leaders with new ideas. We want to be given hope for the future, not revisit the same old problems over and over again. Not that we want history ignored because we need to know where to start from but we do want to see that shiny path ahead of us clearly and within reach.

I read the extraordinary speech made by US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama in Philadelphia where he tackled the problem of race.

In reviewing America’s history with race, he said: “I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.”

Some of the issues that have concerned Americans have also concerned us, and the lack of unity is one of them.

To this, Obama responded by acknowledging his mixed ethnic background and saying, “It is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.”

And indeed Democratic voters agreed with him and voted for him even in states that had seemed prejudiced against black men.

The same thing happened in our country. Unfortunately, race politics has not really died down yet, and some people reacted as if ethnic cleansing had just taken place.

Where is our own Obama to lead us into our future, with faith and hope? Have we heard yet one speech of optimism recently that inspires and unites us all?

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The voters have spoken

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.

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Wednesday March 12, 2008
The voters have spoken
COMMENT
By MARINA MAHATHIR


If politicians should learn one lesson from these elections, it is that humility is the keyword, both for winners and losers.

FOR many it was like the proverbial saying, being caught between a rock and a hard place.

Vote the despicable but familiar, or take the leap into the unknown and vote for the other side. In the end, many decided to chance it.

Going by the various confessions that I have been hearing, many older people – those who have voted in every election and who have voted for the party in power each time – decided that they would try something new this year.

For some, it was an emotional decision, for others it was easy. But all felt they had to do it because they could not take it anymore.

To vote in a government that simply seemed out of touch was un-bearable.

Many said they were simply fed up. They wanted to teach the Government a lesson.

So they just went for it with a vengeance and spared few, felling even those who had been good MPs, and electing untested candidates with few credentials.

Perhaps they had taken a leaf from other countries where unpopular governments had been summarily dismissed.

Of course, being Malaysian, we always have an out clause.

We change most things but not everything. So we left a familiar Government but just made it substantially weaker.

But in four states, and Kuala Lumpur, we decided to try out entirely new administrations.

To bagi chance, as many put it.

It’s a chance for them as well as for us, so that next time round, we can truly make an informed choice and get to compare apples with apples.

But, to see the types of excuses being given by those who lost, one would think that the lesson of this election has simply gone over their heads.

It is everyone else’s fault but theirs.

One even blamed the very voters he had so assiduously courted before.

Others still believe that despite the debacle, people still want them and they should continue.

It’s a bit like a spouse who doesn’t believe the marriage has broken down even when he or she is served the divorce papers.

In the face of denial such as this, there is no room for subtlety.

As polite as we are normally, this is not the time for it when unwanted people just don’t understand.

We should come out and say, “We didn’t vote for you because we don’t like you, that’s all there is to it.”

And even if we didn’t personally reject you because we couldn’t vote in your constituency, the fact that we rejected your cohorts elsewhere is a clear enough signal that we want you out, too.

It’s about that concept known as accountability.

How often do we read of major corporate executives who had to resign because they lost their companies millions and billions of dollars?

Or politicians elsewhere who had to step down because of some major scandal?

Someone has to take responsibility for not performing.

And what else is a general election but a report card on performance, which in this case, (the Government) gained a D, if not an outright F?

What’s more, it takes a courageous and noble man to take responsibility.

By refusing to acknowledge responsibility, our former and current leaders are showing not only arrogance but also cowardice.

They believe that by staying in office, they will be protected from possible demands for answers to tricky questions.

And why should they not believe that, when they have done the same to others?

So staying in office is not an act of responsibility, but one of weakness and cowardice.

It is also an act of wilful blindness and deafness.

To wear eyeshades and earplugs is only a temporary measure to block out the growing mumblings among the electorate that their will is only being partially obeyed.

If this continues, then they will make that will known in the not-too-distant future by punishing those who ignored their message.

That will be even more humiliating. So while the opportunity exists for an honourable withdrawal, it should be taken.

Not to say that those who won should feel too triumphant.

If politicians should learn one lesson from these elections, it is that hubris has no place in their make-up.

Humility is the keyword, both for winners and losers.

The thing about arrogance is that, by nature, it cannot be hidden.

The public is not as blind as the arrogant would like to believe.

Nor is the public unable to detect a lack of sincerity and genuineness.

I watched one politician emphatically calling for respect for her opponent at all her ceramah, only to be summarily booted out last Saturday.

The major lesson is that power rightfully rests with the people.

It’s all in that little piece of paper every five years.

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