QUITE a few Malaysians must, in recent weeks, feel like they are in the shoes of the several this writer interacts regularly with on social media. These are Malaysians who went to great personal lengths — many courageously so — to become politically involved in the hope of bringing about what they consider to be a better Malaysia that we all deserve.
The uncomplicated and intensely sincere-felt desire to make good on such a hope was richly and perhaps unexpectedly rewarded in the early hours of May 10. In the words of one such Malaysian here in Sarawak, he was hoping for the best while fully expecting the worst.
Such political neophytes are in the midst of self-improvised crash courses in political realism these past couple of weeks. A series of recent events and political developments had forced them to immerse themselves in bouts of necessary self-justifications.
One such event was when DAP secretary-general and Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng stated that he would defer to the prime minister on the issue of whether the country ought to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).
It cannot escape irony that had MCA or Gerakan come up with a similar statement under the previous political dispensation, DAP would probably have issued some statement of moral indignation over the former’s lack of scruples, much less principles.
A card-carrying DAP member and activist justified Lim’s stance — with DAP in government now, it is better to compromise — exactly the same political predicament MCA and Gerakan were in before, surely Then there is the near universal silence (probably caused as much by shock than anything) of like political activists sympathetic to PKR over how party-election chicanery, particularly over the high-stakes deputy presidency post, caused such a severe political reckoning even in Sarawak that it may eventually claim the scalp of lone Sarawak Federal minister Baru Bian.
Is it finally dawning on such well-meaning political activists that the more things change as they have fought so hard for, the more they will likely stay the same? And that, in the end, it is left to a 93-year-old statesman and political veteran to help us sort through all of the disruptions many among us caused (with good and undoubted justifications).
There is a silver lining in all this, of course, and we should really be a bit more patient, perhaps, with the workings of our imperfect democracy (which country has a perfect democracy, anyway?) and the probably very steep learning curve our informed electorate is undergoing as it grapples with the newly discovered power to effect a change in government.
It will have to desist from any tendency to treat politics as some spectator sports to entertain and distract us from our daily drudgery and to expect somehow, at the end of it all, that the miracle of a better governed nation will materialise.
Political freedom, as with most wonderful things landing in fallible human hands, is always a good servant, but potentially a bad master if we abuse it, as is almost our human wont.
We abuse freedom by thinking our collective responsibilities end with the casting of our votes at the ballot box. We abuse it further by expecting those we elect into office to pander to our every whim and progressively impress us with ever more populist measures till they end up sundering our entire national fabric.
The grave danger is, if we fall into the democratic trap that developed Western nations are falling into — despite the guardrails of democratic checks and balance and the lively activism of a full-fledged civil society, a nation can easily be lulled into utter complacency only to
wake up to the reality that all hell may be breaking loose.
Such is the sense of collective dismay in the West that some scribes are ascribing to New Malaysia the mantle of democracy’s “saviour”. We must not delude ourselves into thinking we are or can be any such thing.
No country is exceptional in that sense.
We have more than our share of foibles and flaws. I doubt that Malaysians can be superhumanly vigilant and diligent to make democracy truly work for us. So, thanks but no thanks.
This writer, at least, is more than content with our uniquely Malaysian hybrid of a democracy, warts and all.
John Teo views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak