Malaysia faces daunting challenges in the roads ahead. The quest for a Malaysian identity still eludes us because after 53 years of independence, Malaysians still fail to consider themselves 1Malaysians.
This is hardly a surprise as many Malaysians who descended from migrant lineages still think like migrants, ever searching for that perfect home ‘elsewhere’, forgetting the fact that the foreboding environment that drove their ancestors to seek greener pastures (or any pasturing at all) is but a distant memory; shunning from the responsibilities of home improvements. But how can we blame them when part of our society seems to have memories and emotions stretching back further than they have lived, hell-bent on reminding the Chinese and Indian descendants for being sojourn visitors, living under the courtesy of the ‘Bumiputras’, and this courtesy justifies discriminatory policies. Even a man utterly lacking in internal morality would recognise that this logic is offensive to fundamental human dignity.
But then again, how can we blame ourselves for our warped sense of logic when we are forced to live in an environment of fear where any discourse on racial or religious issue can potentially be seditious. We have been made to believe that Malaysia is unique simply because we have a multi-everything country and this multi-everythingness requires us to do things ‘our own way’, and apparently ‘our own way’ consists of, amongst others:
1. Discriminatory policy,
2. Laws criminalising the questioning of discriminatory policy,
3. Constitutional provisions allowing laws criminalising the questioning of discriminatory policy,
4. Laws preventing certain provisions of the constitution from being debated even in the parliament
5. Constitutional amendments that defeats the purpose of having a constitution
6. Declarations of emergency that seemed to last forever
From what I can deduce, our government seemed to think that cultivating a culture of fear actually does us good in protecting ourselves from our uber sensitive savage hidden within that is ready to surface and throw a fit of violence at any hint of racial or religious discourse.
On the flipside, this identity crisis can be looked at as an inconvenient teething phase that our country had to experience before maturity. While the collective memory of Malaysians extends far into our shared past, the latest incarnation of Malaysian society is but half a century old. Emergent nations throughout history have had various identity issues to iron out, some lasting centuries before resolution, others persist as irreconcilable conflicts.
The timing for our identity crisis also seemed to point to the fact that Malaysian society is experiencing a transition, a metamorphosis into a more mature form. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provides an insight into our current transformation – the rise of the middle class, the shift in our collective consciousness beyond the mundane and into the abstract, the rising awareness of civil, political and individual rights – all points to a society in transition. This transition is an important milestone in the history of our nation, a milestone we must approach carefully and thoughtfully because we are heading towards a society that treads the fine balance between social order and social justice. A failure to embrace the incoming tides of change would result in tipping the balance away from social justice, creating a state of order through fear and oppression.
In the spirits of festivities, I earnestly hope that Malaysia would find the courage to balance the scale of order and justice, delivering us from a society of compromise to a society of true tolerance.
Happy Merdeka, happy birthday and selamat Hari Raya Malaysia!
Lua Bo Feng
September 2010
