An inconvenient truth

It's easy to complain, but it's a whole other thing to work for change.

COMMENT

Say what you will about Hindraf Makkal Sakthi chairman P Waythamoorthy, he was right in his message about non-Malay complacency in the face of rising racial and religious extremism.
It’s an inconvenient truth the nons have been tiptoeing around for quite some time.

It’s easy enough to sit around the campfire complaining, but it’s a whole other thing to roll up your sleeves and work for change.

Waytha puts it to us that it is the apathy of the non-Malay communities that is partly to blame for the sharp spike of conservative extremism the country seems hurtling towards. He mentions the not-so-secret advice handed down to every non-Malay child the day he or she enters school – study hard so you can get out of here before it’s too late. He mentions the political excuses we give ourselves for not standing up for our rights, and he says our silence is our consent to the right-wing forces as they seek to remake Malaysia in their image.

The fact is that democracy revolves around making your voice heard, and as the past year has shown, chauvinistic groups are indeed good at making their voices heard. If only one side of the narrative is driving the argument, then by no means should the other side cry foul if it has failed to defend its position.

Surely, fairness is rooted in common sense. Alas, common sense is relative. In the era we live in, it seems that the culture wars have become winner-take-all affairs.

You may say that you have made your voice heard. You slept in the streets during Bersih demonstrations and you marched in the sun till your skin burned and shouted slogans all day till your voice grew hoarse. However, those are one-off events.

Change can be effected only by sustained pressure, the kind that forces leaders to resign, the kind that reshapes governments, not by the Malaysian love of taking to social media to “mohon viralkan”. That is not how politics works. The voice of the people is ultimately heard through their ballots.

Of course, our collective apathy is not the only thing to blame for the situation we find ourselves in, but it is not an insignificant part of it. We can argue for days on whether Waytha was right in saying that the moderate Malays do not stand up for the nons. We can talk forever about the establishment’s ownership of the major means of information distribution to people in the heartlands, who make up its voter base. However, we must admit that non-Malay Malaysia has been quite content to take the occasional punch as long as we are largely left to our own devices.

The nons just want a fairer shake, and that is something worth standing up for. Many of us are worried that increasing the powers of the shariah court will eventually infringe on the way we live our lives. That is worth standing up for as well. But if we ourselves cannot be bothered to stand up for our own rights, perhaps the only solution is whispering to our children, “Run.” -FMT