Get your scepticism on

Get your scepticism on
Sunday, 31 Mar 2019
by marina mahathir

SOMETIMES when I read the horrific toxic messages that go around WhatsApp groups, I have to wonder about my people. Do we enjoy being whipped up into agitation? Do we find reading bad news pleasurable? Is it really blissful to wallow in ignorance? Don’t we mind being manipulated by irresponsible people?

I once came across an old handbook of “bazaar Malay” produced by the British Allied Land Forces in 1945 as they prepared to return to Malaya after the Japanese occupation ended. Besides the instructions on how to speak simple Malay, albeit not always grammatically or pronounced correctly, there are guides to “knowing Malays”. It seems that Malays are friendly “mannered” people who are quite happy to help, “provided they are not intimidated, shouted at or insulted”.

Why they did not refer to the other people living in Malaya at the time remains a mystery. Perhaps they meant to condescend to one lot of folks at a time.

What interested me is that trope of how we are really nice people until we are intimidated, shouted at or insulted. There is probably some truth in this, because it suggests that we have some dignity and pride in our psychological makeup, that we will stand up to any form of affront from other people. We are cooperative if we are asked politely and we won’t stand for any insults. All well and good.

But what do we find these days? First of all, we are intimidated, shouted at and insulted by our own people. Was this something we learnt from our former colonisers on how to “control” people?

Just use heavy-handedness and loudness, never mind who’s right or wrong? Insult people by telling them they’re ignorant of democracy, while at the same time limiting democratic space? Rush to the police station to make reports, without ever bothering to find out what the actual issue is?

I am really puzzled by this. But even more, I am bemused by the willingness of so many people to be intimidated and to swallow whole whatever is fed them, despite the fact that what is being shoved down their throats are really insults to the intelligence. Have we become so indolent that we are unwilling to use our brains to be a bit more sceptical of what we are told?

I see people who accept the mis-characterisations of very simple events as gospel. A women’s march becomes an LGBT march. An international convention becomes a threat to sovereignty. A plan to save an institution becomes a conspiracy to destroy it instead. Some of these are things made up by people with evil on their minds, people who are intent to destroy, not support and develop a nation. Some are paid to pass on these disgusting messages especially on social media. They are soldiers of unhappiness and despair whose only aim is to make us disgruntled and frustrated.

I’m not saying that everything we are facing now is wonderful or that our new government is getting everything right. Very often our current ministers are also capable of insulting our intelligence. But nothing beats the outrageous lies that are being perpetrated on social media which people pass on and on. Everybody really needs a good dose of scepticism. Or do we just love to believe conspiracy theories, even the most unlikely ones, because they sound so fantastic that they must be true. Fact is supposed to be stranger than fiction, right? So, if someone tells us that a two-headed half-cat half-dog appeared in their backyard, we must believe this. Because these things happen.

And we think this makes us smart?

There is already so much misery in the world without us needlessly adding to it with false stories. There are still people starving, being bombed, having to run away from their countries on precarious journeys, being beaten up daily, that we don’t need to drown people in more depressing stories which aren’t grounded in fact.

Or worse, twist facts to suit our own ends, even when the net result is actually more unhappiness.

The thing is, some of the spinning that is being done online and viralised is only meant to make a few people happy and the majority forever in chains, if not literally but at least mentally. I don’t understand why we don’t worry about our people’s lack of scepticism and critical analysis of anything they are told. Our students who go overseas often find that they are severely handicapped by their inability to look at anything they are taught with a critical eye. Their overseas counterparts then shine in class while they flounder. It is the result of our woeful education system but we don’t seem to see the long-term impact of this. We are breeding robots who are only able to think, do or say what they are programmed to.

I saw opponents of a particular international statute cite the arguments put forward by some white guy as justification for not signing it. It’s interesting that in wanting to defend so-called sovereignty and privileges they still needed to refer to a Western person as if that is the only way to establish authority. But nobody seemed to have taken the trouble to look up the guy and see what a dubious person he is. Incredibly, white guys are considered really good when they support whatever position you want them to regardless of whether they actually have any credibility at all. This must account for the number of people who think Hitler was cool, without realising that the Fuhrer would just as soon send them to the ovens too for the simple reason of not being Aryan. By the way, white supremacists would secretly admit to admiring old Adolf as well if they wouldn’t get arrested for saying it publicly. You know, the type that shoots people up in mosques. All bred from the same Hitlerite petri dish.

When I see the type of nonsense that passes for news going around social media and WhatsApp, its hardly surprising that there is such a mental health crisis these days. More and more people are depressed and I’m pretty sure that it is because, besides actual bad news that floods them daily in the media, of all the fake and distorted stuff that pings into their chat groups relentlessly every minute of the day. None of it is happy news. None of it makes you feel better about yourself or about your neighbours and country. Sure, occasionally there are some well-meaning homilies about friendship or gratitude or cute cat pictures. But the majority of the stuff is guaranteed to make you ill. Considering that some of these things come in all night, don’t you wonder about the health of people who never seem to sleep?

I think we need to get a grip and really examine what we are doing to ourselves. Sure, we need to voice out our concerns on what we think is not right. But can we at least promise ourselves to first take a deep breath and not jump on the online podium the minute we read something; second, find out whether what we’re reading is true or not, and third, write a cogent argument against whatever we disagree with, backed by facts? Can we remember that the “information” we get are often sent by people who are paid to make up stuff just to make us angry?

Can we honestly call ourselves an intelligent people, rather than a gullible one?

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All upside down

All upside down
Sunday, 24 Feb 2019
by marina mahathir

I REMEMBER more than a year ago feeling dizzy because I thought the world had turned upside down. Things that used to be true were then declared fake, values that used to be upheld were discarded and their opposites lauded instead.

I remember feeling disorientated; something felt very wrong but it was not discussed out in the open.

Turned out I was not the only one who felt that way.

Enough of us couldn’t ignore that niggling feeling in our gut and decided enough was enough and threw the people with confused values out. I thank the Almighty every day for saving us from that disaster.

I read about an incident when a young minister who had gone to campaign for the Semenyih by-election had been verbally abused and attacked.

That was bad enough but when I read the comments, I realised that for some people, their values are totally based on their loyalties, rather than principles, and these can get very warped.

Many suggested that if you venture into “enemy territory”, then you should expect violence. Really? This is news to me. Unless of course our politics scene is now ruled by that sort of gangster mentality.

Previously anyone could go and campaign during an election or by-election without expecting violence. That was the sort of country and people we were. Now has violence become the norm?

Worse still, some people were actually proud of it. Poor things, nothing else in their lives to be proud of perhaps? (And all this coming from self-proclaimed champions of the Malay race, the race that used to be lauded for our good manners.)

This is not the only upside-down value we are seeing these days. Some people see nothing wrong in promoting their colleagues’ wives to special positions, even excusing this as “women empowerment”.

If this is to support the 30% allocation for women on boards and other decision-making positions, then they must show the total number of women appointed and what their qualifications are.

I have no doubt that some very qualified women are married to public figures. In that case, publish the candidate’s full CV and the requirements of the position and let the public judge.

Building a wall between those candidates and their husbands might be a good idea too.

As children we are often told to think before we speak, so that we don’t say anything offensive to others. I do think that it’s equally offensive when people open their mouths and say things that are completely tone-deaf.

When women find themselves victims of abuse and violence, there should be outrage.

Instead, often there is victim-blaming, including that she should not have been out alone. Women frequently have no choice but to go out on their own. And when you need to get into a lift, are you supposed to wait until there are lots of people in it? Especially so early in the morning?

Another case of upside-down values: misrepresenting one’s qualifications. First of all, have we as a society put so much premium on having a degree that we don’t care anymore what quality is involved? Is this why all that our folks care about is getting their children into universities and not what sort of education they are getting?

Apart from that, for whatever reason a person needs to misrepresent their qualifications, I have to wonder what they tell their children. We constantly remind our children to study hard in school, scold them when they don’t do well and celebrate when they do. We expect them to burn the midnight oil when they go to university because we know that a good degree gives them a head start in life.

But if you get your degree without doing any of these, how do you explain this to your own children? Or do you tell them that it’s okay not to work hard because they can still get a good position anyway, by embellishing their educational credentials?

That only works in certain fields but in the private sector at least, or indeed in any company or organisation that cares about the quality of its employees, those credentials will be scrutinised very closely.

I once went to Harvard Business School on a short course where they were trying to see if business principles can be applied to the running of non-governmental organisations. It was a great experience and I learnt a lot. But I cannot say I got a degree from Harvard Business School.

Such warped thinking needs to be corrected. It is a hundred times better to say that you have no degree but have the savvy and street smarts to rise up in the world than to pretend that you have a non-existent degree.

There is nothing wrong with not having a degree; lots of amazing people have made it without one. The degree you get from the university of real life is sometimes better than any paper one.

Of course, if you have a degree, and, even better, a post-graduate one, then you are expected to think and speak at a level that should be more sophisticated than the pedestrian one that most people do.

Which makes me wonder if we should scrutinise every public figure’s academic credentials, given the whimsical way they often speak.

The new Malaysia has no room for thugs, fakes, conmen, snake oil salesmen and all the other charlatans we see coming out of the woodwork these days.

We need people who have integrity, who know their stuff, who have principles and who are unafraid to act on them. Good leaders set the tone for the country, they provide the moral examples that the rest of us follow.

We have already had the leaders who bent the rules to their advantage, who made lying permissible and naturally their followers slithered in their footsteps.

But we’re tired of all that. We’ve seen where dishonesty has taken us, as it has so many countries around the world. We deserve better than that.

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Girls are to blame for everything

Girls are to blame for everything
Sunday, 27 Jan 2019
by marina mahathir

That seems to be the wrong-headed thinking in some circles. What we need to do instead is teach our children that sexual harassment and sexual violence arise from an environment that does not treat girls and boys equally.

IF it were not for one sharp-eyed mother, we would never have found out how deep the rot in our schools is. There it was, that page in a textbook blithely telling our Year Three girls what shame and horror await them if they forget to close the door while changing clothes.

Year Three, folks! Nine-year-olds being told that the entire weight of the honour of their families rests on their thin shoulders. And the not-so-subtle implication that if you don’t wear appropriate clothes, if you walk in dark alleys and don’t close room doors, you will suffer from emotional pain, have no friends, and your families will undoubtedly disown you for shaming them.

Who in their right mind tells children this? Only sick people.

If this is an official document from the Education Ministry, there must have been a process through which it was commissioned, vetted and approved. How does this process work? Did somebody say they need a document on sexual harassment, somebody writes any old rubbish that comes into their heads, and it gets approved and printed?

Notice that not the slightest bit of brain power went into this process. Nobody asked what the best approach for an undoubtedly serious and growing problem would be. Nobody thought to consult people who have some expertise on this issue. Women’s groups, perhaps, or psychologists or child rights advocates.

Imagine if we needed to curb the problem of rape and we simply commissioned an official publication that declared that all boys above the age of 12 should be locked up because of the likelihood that their burgeoning hormones would make them uncontrollable. Boy, would there be an uproar!
 
But when it comes to girls, no such uproar erupts. Whoever was in charge of producing this gem of a teaching aid was totally oblivious to the sheer wrongheadedness of the entire approach.

Of course, girls must protect their own honour and modesty! Of course, they will have to face dire consequences if something happens to them. Of course, they are the only people responsible for anything bad that happens to them.

To think that the Education Ministry, the entire education system, school principals, teachers and most parents did not pick up on this until this one parent pointed it out. All those women in our education system, did they think it was OK to talk to schoolgirls like this? To tell them that it’s so easy to lose their worth?

If this from the Education Ministry was bad, what issued forth from the Women, Family and Community Develop-ment Ministry is worse simply because it is the ministry with a focus on women and should know better.

In a series of Instagram memes, the ministry held forth on the dangers of premarital sex and pregnancy. The issues are real but how do pronouncements on social media along the lines of “Abandoning babies is a crime. Don’t start it.” help a teenager who finds herself pregnant and is terrified of what her parents will say? How do you tell teens that they can get pregnant even if they have sex only once when they can’t make the connection between copulation and conception?

I don’t know what it is about Malaysians but when something like this happens, we act as if it is the first time it’s ever happened. We live in such silos, ring-fenced by our own prejudices, that we learn nothing from anything outside these narrow confines.

Let me remind everyone of the story of a young woman called Noor Suzaily Mokhtar, a computer engineer who, in 2000, was raped and murdered by a bus driver while on her way to work. She was wearing very modest clothes, including a hijab, and was simply sitting in a bus in broad daylight.

In what way does Suzaily’s case relate to that page in the textbook we are showing our nine-year-olds or to those social media campaigns aimed at youth? Not at all. Because when girls are sexually harassed or worse, it has nothing to do with how they dress, where they are, or how they behave. It’s because a sick male, who’s often physically stronger, decides that this female can be taken advantage of. Or worse.

We need to teach our children that the wrongness of sexual harassment and sexual violence (and surely we agree they are wrong?) does not derive from the supposedly bad behaviour of the victim but from an environment that does not treat girls and boys equally.

If we think of girls as inferior, then it subliminally gives out the message to boys that they can treat girls badly. If we keep hammering into our boys that they are superior, both physically and mentally, then we are setting up a situation where the reality of their lives will simply not meet their expectations. And mayhem will ensue.

Imagine telling a boy that he is the best, top of the heap, just because he is a boy. And then he finds that he doesn’t automatically come out top in class. In fact, a girl (or several girls) has beaten him to the top. How does this make sense to him? He’s been told repeatedly that girls are not as good as him, how come they’re ahead of him?

We see this scenario repeated over and over again as girls keep their heads down and work hard while boys, and later on men, walk around cocksure that their place in the world is secure. And then they find out it’s not. Those “inferior” women are achieving more and earning more. Life is not as it should be.

How else do they keep women in their place but to go back to the drawing board? Start in school where they are most easily influenced. Tell girls they are not equal, that they are responsible for everything bad in the world from those young years and they will bow down and obey.

And the powers in charge of our schools and in our government departments facilitate this by publishing and distributing the type of trash that we saw recently.

Perhaps people are simply not aware of what they are doing. Perhaps they thought this is the normal way to teach children about how to protect themselves. Some-one has convinced them that social media is the only medium that young people read so let’s just bung in some aphorisms on morals. I don’t buy that excuse, unless we accept that ignorance is the normal condition of the civil service.

It’s weird, isn’t it, that the same people who would condemn girls who have been sexually harassed or raped to a lifetime of shame are also the ones who think it’s OK for them to redeem themselves by marrying their rapists? I’m curious, though, how helpful these messages are if the harasser is within your own family? Is that why there is the admonition to always close the door when you’re changing clothes? In case your father or brother sees you and gets ideas?

As adults, we are here to protect our children. We can only do that through a genuine concern for their wellbeing, both physically and emotionally, by ensuring that every space they are in, whether it is the home, school or any public place is a safe one for them. If we hold them responsible for what happens to them, then we are abrogating our responsibilities as parents, guardians and teachers.

The Education Ministry is revising that page. The Women, Family and Community Development Ministry has not yet taken down those Instagram messages. How many young people have seen them by now? Imagine a young girl reading them and thinking that not a single adult will ever stand up for her. How securely will she grow up?

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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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