House built on sand?
KTemoc Konsiders
One of my fave columnists, Zan Azlee, penned a most interesting, relevant and important article in Malaysiakini titled The opposition must tell us who we’re voting for.
I have long liked reading Zan’s articles for his humour, tongue-in-cheek jabs at appropriate people a la Dean Johns, another of my fave columnists at Malaysiakini, but most of all, for Zan’s love of being foremost a Malaysian.
Zan wrote: One of the most important things that a political party needs to do when a general election is looming is to make it known to the voters of their manifesto, intentions, promises and plans for when they take office, if they were to win, of course.
In order to do all that, they would need to have clear leadership. As of today, Pakatan Harapan has failed to do that by being unable to decide on who would be their choice for prime minister should they win.
Opposition Leader Wan Azizah Wan Ismail yesterday stated that they will concentrate on winning the elections first before deciding on their prime ministerial candidate. She said the decision will be made based on who has the most support from those elected.
In my opinion, this is just nonsense. Wouldn’t it make more sense to decide now so that the voters will know what they will be getting themselves into when they vote? We need to know who and what we are voting for, don’t we?
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| you may be voting for me, wakakaka … I mean, Alhamdulillah |
To emphasize what Zan means, there is an old English saying which may give offence to my Muslim friends, especially when they are about to celebrate their completion of a month-long disciplined empathetic fasting.
By the by, I hope you know the meaning of ’empathetic’ (as totally different from ’emphatic’ from the word ’emphasize’ seen in the immediate above paragraph), which to help if you don’t, has been defined by the dictionary as ‘showing an ability to understand and share the feelings of another’.
I’ve cut and now paste an extract from an Islamic website about empathetic fasting for your perusal:
Empathizing With Less Fortunate Ones:
During fast a Muslim neither eats nor drinks during the whole day for the whole month. This being deprived from food and water is perhaps the story of every other day of the people who are unfortunate and don’t have access to even the basic necessities of life such as food for eating and clean water for drinking.
Thus, when a Muslim bears such kind of condition, he or she actually empathizes with what the less unfortunate go through every day and they then get to feel that how do such people live their life.
This empathizing then leads to softening of their hearts and makes them more sensible as well as charitable when it comes to the less fortunate ones and their sufferings.
Thus, i.a.w. above, going to a 5-start hotel in KL to go berserk during breaking fast in the evening (ifthar), wakakaka, is definitely a no no.
Anyway, back to my English saying but please examine it metaphorically (not literally) as it’s after all an English saying, namely: ‘Don’t buy a pig in a poke’.
According to one explanation, the idiom ‘Don’t buy a pig in a poke’ refers to a confidence trick during the Late Middle Ages, when meat (pork, beef, chicken, mutton, duck, goose) was scarce, but cats and dogs were not.
