Explain and Educate
I’ve been reading MT for a couple of years. I notice that many times we have asked the opposition to buck up or else face the wrath of the voters. We also keep saying that the voter is the boss but somehow I feel like we are begging the politicians to do a good job for us.
By Chris
Can we all say that most of the politicians out there have their own agendas in the guise of championing social issues? See, the thing is politicians really can say – what the hell I care if you’re poor. If they are from BN, you can basically forget what good they are for. As for the opposition politicians, they know that they still have some chance to be up there as long as BN is screwing around. So what if they are not performing? You can go ahead and vote for BN and suck up all the misdeeds – after all we have been used to it for the past 52 years.
Therefore, we are not the real bosses yet, per say. We are only the real bosses when the majority is educated, civilized and matured. When that happens, we will have better quality of politicians and form a better government.
Now, in my humble opinion, we should focus more on building a better educated, civilized and matured society. I believe this can be achieved other than from a political platform. The question is, how can we do this without the political will.
Sure, we can organize more campaigns but we need to explain the effects of social ills like corruption, human rights violation etc and this has to be made easily understandable that anyone from the street knows what you’re talking about. It should also be targeted to the rural folks. I know SABM and other groups have been doing a good job in this. Hopefully, there will be more to come. Besides that, while campaigning for people to register to vote is a good exercise, I realize effort to explain on why we should vote is insufficient. As mentioned before, most people vote for the opposition mainly because they hate BN. For those who voted for change, we need to ask ourselves what’s next if the opposition really takes over the government and start to behave like BN? Do we seriously think that BN will change after the fall?
It’s time to change from continuously drumming on the evil deeds done by BN or ‘begging’ the opposition to rise to the occasion. I really believe that we can do a good job in educating the society just like how we have campaigned hard for the opposition. Once the masses think and act in the same direction, the rakyat is unstoppable. More alternative parties with true passion to serve the society will need to be established. Some may view that this will take a good 10 or 20 years. Look at it this way. Those years are going to pass anyway and it will not get better until we, the society really take charge. The only question is – how will we spend them and where will we be after those years? I see hope.
