Grandpa, were you a jerk?
By Batsman
This is about change and the need for change. It is a question that most people don’t care a damn about while a few agonize painfully over it even if in a slightly different way – complaining about apathy, cowardice and so on.
Eastern communities are notoriously famous for conservatism. Even in Japan where the Meiji Restoration was seen as timely and revolutionary and Japan is a model of eastern modernity and progress, the LDP has been in power for just about as long as UMNO has been.
China – if the West and Japan hadn’t tried to bully it, carve it up and rob it blind – would doubtless still be under dynastic rule even if it may not be Manchu. Even today, Confucianism is making a comeback in spite of the most vigorous efforts of the ruling communists to consign it to the 2000 year old past.
What is it about Eastern societies that make them so resistant to change? Believe it or not, I have views on this too, but it is another story.
It would be fine and dandy if there were no need to change. I would be the first one to sit back and enjoy my family. However, in today’s world, without change and improvement, a society is condemned to backwardness and eventual bullying. If others change and improve faster, one is condemned to servitude and be “me too” followers. One would have to learn the language of others just to catch up and to appear modern and progressive, e.g. Malays have to learn English and Chinese have to learn English while the Indians will have probably already learnt English – in Maths, in Science and in everything else in between.
Sadly, because our ancestors did not change and improve, many are of the opinion that we now have to lump this situation or be further condemned to even greater backwardness.
In other fields we would never be the top managers even in our own hotels and these places will be reserved only for foreigners, especially Caucasians while the hotels we DO run ourselves go to seed and end in bankruptcy.
Even in body language, we show ourselves as third class in relation to Caucasians, groveling and putting on fake smiles while Malays complain about being threatened by the nons and the nons complain about being second class citizens in our own country and we all get jealous of each other’s wealth and benefits.
Do we have the right to ask what our grandfathers did or did not do for us to deserve all of this? If we do, then we show we are completely Asian and that our grandchildren will have the same right to ask if we were the jerks when it was our time to do something.
The sad part is, we are not even seeking world shaking revolutionary changes. We are just asking for a system that we inherited to work properly, with effective checks and balances, without corruption, without abuse of power, without a completely unprofessional, biased, corrupt, mercenary and sycophantic civil service, police and judiciary, without the need to detain people without trial under the ISA and torture them, without the need to use the Sedition Act to put the fear of the Government in the people.
Even for these measly demands, there is a most vile, vicious and violent resistance to change which puts off everybody and triggers accusations of apathy and cowardice among the people themselves. We therefore need to invent slogans such as Malaysia Boleh, One Malaysia and Vision 2020 to convince ourselves that we are all united and we are up there with the rest of the world – not wallowing in a cesspool of our own making.
Meanwhile, we also try to convince ourselves that the 13th GE will see the changes we all seek and that we need do nothing but wait for the 13th GE to come along.
I wonder when the 13th GE comes and goes and one generation hands over to the next, what will we say when our own grandchildren ask, “Grandpa, were you a jerk?”
