Today I'm reading about postcoloniality. And I wonder what we do with our colonial experience. Do we do what Mahathir did, castigating the West, but determined to win on the playing field that they have defined? Or what Badawi and Najib have done, are doing - and if someone could explain to me the big picture behind either of them, I'd be impressed. Or what Anwar seems to want, the capitalist playground, with Islamic tinges of social justice in the margins? We'll tinker with the system, but we'll pretend, along with most of the world, that it works.
But the system just isn't working. In the United States, which may not be the epitome of democracy or freedom as it assumes, but is certainly the epitome of 'this system', the gap between rich and poor helps to wage a war on the underclass that is labelled a war on drugs, occasionally labelled a war on poverty, but appears to be a war on the poor. Things aren't much better in Europe, where the drift to the right seems in danger of becoming less of a drift, more full throttle. And all of it not even a nod to climate change, that which turning our world upside down.
In Malaysia, we don't want to grapple with any of this. Climate change isn't our problem, crime is. We don't want to look at alternative economic models, we just want to excise the corruption from this one. We think more cops on the streets, straight, good cops, is going to stop the crime - when nowhere notime has ever shown this to be true.
What we need in Malaysia right now is not leadership and certainly not unity (and probably a lot less certainty as well). We need discussion and debate and to work out some of the issues that we have been bequeathed by both colonialism and the colonialists' chosen successors. We need education and reading, and I love BFM's Night School for at least attempting this, and Hisham Rais and the concept of UBU, and late night Malay-language Marxism classes.
Yet, even here we're missing the main topic. Top of any country's agenda has to be survival - as in how do we slow down and reverse our contributions to climate change, and how do we anticipate and deal with the consequences. I don't think this is overly alarmist - any perusal of the literature on climate change makes it pretty conservative.
Where they are contributing is to our more endemic issues. Though I'd love to see an inclusive discussion, with all Malaysians (or at least a more representative spectrum than the spectrum of Malay men currently on offer), on the place of Islam in public life. If the last decade has shown us anything, it is surely that, first, Islam has a place in Malaysian, not just Malay, public life, and, second, that we are all going to be (and currently are) affected by it. We need an inclusive discussion on how we are collectively going to agree on what that place is. We need this discussion to be open and frank and multi-leveled. And it needs to be related to a discussion on federalism, on the State-Federal relationship. And local government, and how this all fit together.
I don't know what the answers are, but I know that if we don't start talking about these questions, all of us, then we're going to remain captives of our colonial masters' heritage well into the future.
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