Pepsi or Coke? I’m not thirsty

Can either side win the youth vote, with voter apathy at what seems to be an all-time high?

By Lauren Ashley, Free Malaysia Today

The common consensus is that the opposite of love is hate. The opposite of loving your country is hating it, and the opposite of loving your government is taking up arms to topple it. The thing is, love and hate both involve extreme feelings and they can be harder to distinguish than one would think.

It is possible to love your country so much that you hate it, and you hate the options being thrown at you which claim to be “the lesser evil”.

The problem here is that you don’t want evil at all – you want to be able to vote for someone who isn’t a blatant hypocrite, who hasn’t destroyed the ethnic relations between the community you would die for. That’s #UndiRosak for you – a desperate plea for someone to give Malaysia the governance it deserves.

Apathy, on the other hand, is quite different. I turn 20 soon, old enough to understand the political scene but not old enough to vote. I have friends who have just turned 21, and when I ask if they have registered to vote, they laugh nervously. They tell me that when they are faced with corruption on both sides, they would prefer not to have a hand in electing either to power.

I wish I could condemn them for their apathy, that I could yell at them for not using the power that democracy gives them.

But no matter how much I want it to be, the world is not black and white. It is painted with murky shades of grey. There are no hard lines on what is morally justifiable. The justifications bleed past their boundaries like watercolours on wet paper.

I want to call them stupid for not voting, no matter how insignificant they think a single vote is, because it adds up.

But I can’t. I can’t blame them for being disenchanted with a system that has been flawed since long before their birth, for odds that have been stacked against them, for the system that grows more and more regressive despite their screams for progress. I can’t blame them for hating the government that knows that knowledge is power and deliberately traps them in ignorance.

I can’t blame them for not wanting to vote in an opposition whose only response when asked why we should bring them to power is that they “are not the government”; an opposition who will not admit to their own mistakes.

They just don’t care, and I can’t blame them for saying they’re not thirsty when asked if they want “Pepsi or Coke”.

Nonetheless, I hope that my peers will look past this, and towards the future. I hope our politicians stop the childish name-calling and start delivering policies that we can look forward to, and being the leaders this country deserves.

And this is all I have to say to every person who thinks their vote doesn’t count: according to Chaos Theory, a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane. A single vote, multiplied by all the people who think they don’t matter, is enough to cause a tsunami.