Emigration: Are you a quitter? Who really cares?
(MMO) – The public listed entrepreneur does not want to pay more taxes so your children in public schools are better qualified, he does so in order that your kids can work for them and more importantly they don’t stab their private schooled kids over spare change.
Quitters never win, or do they?
When the social climate in the country goes sour — as it has presently — along with depressing economic numbers, it becomes the season of discontent made glorious summer by people moving to rear sheep in New Zealand or do computer coding, I forget.
(My old mate Kevin Moar of our Tamil chapter in Wellington, is currently touring Sabah with his kids and wife Rosy, so a real shout-out to him and I wonder if he’d sing us a song…)
It reminds me of a Kelantanese who fussed over for years in the noughties about the grass on the other side and the livestock on it looking amazingly greener, who has since settled into Malaysian corporate comfort; and another family in Seremban whose proverbial needle which broke their camel’s back was over local residential committee shenanigans involving security ushering them to a bon voyage for “middle earth” so their children learn about the Treaty of Waitangi.
Was there ever a time in the last 10 years someone with a strong degree and professional credentials not thought about marketing in Detroit, keeping books in Birmingham, managing a bookstore in Perth or yes, fearfully, hold up Velcro gloves in a shire south of the south most capital in an aptly named North Island?
The way Malaysia is and if being honest about it has been for several years, has given cause to those with mobility to weigh it far more seriously than I wish they did.
In case it was not plaintively clear, it’s not a choice to me — being part of the solution has been my life’s ambition.
But what about the quitters? Should I line up with ardent fans of the country and yell profanities at them as they walk off the plank to blue seas without sharks, join the chorus: “Good riddance, we don’t need you anyways”?
There are no good exits, just regrettable ones — for those who remain! Ours is not of misunderstood ruffians jumping on floating planks waiting for the north-easterly winds to guide them to a UN refugee camp.
Our departed use their business miles for the tickets, rely on good container services for the transporting and have espresso at the airport lounge before heading to gate C — you later, just kidding.
So if you are one to proudly exclaim your love for nation and zero tolerance for quitters — these quitters — then you are one dumb shmuck. The electronic scoreboard is actually reading, World 1 Malaysia 0.
