Many things could describe the past two separate years that merged into one. Here, I would describe it as the taming of our society. The fire that powered many before was doused by shocks and disappointments of February 2020 along with all the political development that followed. This broke the heart of many.
And if there were still beating heart fighting on the political front, the pandemic that flared up soon after broke the body of many. The crisis and its mismanagement brought debilitating economic effects that forced many to switch attention away politics (politics here is not the narrowly defined partisan-party politics, but one about governance and the overall organization of society) to that of personal livelihood. Many died along the way.
Malaysian society as it was before the pandemic was mostly too polite for our own good, but the bludgeons needed to fight the pandemic turned that politeness into utter submission. There were noise and protests against the manner government regulation was applied incompetently. Some went to the streets. But those noise and protests were nothing compared to the years before. During the pandemic, far too few could, or willing to go to the ground, divided out of fear of getting infected, or the need to work at a time when unemployment was soaring, furloughing was the talks of the town, and wages were cut down significantly.
The foundation which the Muhyiddin government stood on was shaky soon after its undemocratic formation, but it stood for so long because any anger was contained by fear, or deference of power. But the ember-like anger burnt further and when it appeared a fire was about to lit—even patience among the polite has its limits—the irresponsible government played poker: they raised the stakes by declaring emergency. The stakes were raised to the point the polite did not dare challenge it too fiercely. Or they were too tired, and hapless.
The subsequent government under Ismail Sabri lowered the temperature for a while but the incompetence remained. That same incompetence was for all to see during the recent great floods across the peninsula. The further loss of life and property raised the political temperature yet again. The politics of race and religion showed it was all meaningless in the face of incompetence, so much so that this administration that largely has the same Cabinet members who previously prided itself as a Malay-Muslim government, has stopped marketing itself as one.
Amid the troubles faced by the general public, yet another scandal is erupting in the public first involving the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, and as national crisis tends to pull other public institutions into the ditch (1MDB was one such case but on a grander scale), later the Securities Commission. A good institutional set-up would have contained it. This government prefers to drag everything down, for their benefits, at the expense of the country. All that highlights how institutional reforms achieved due to the 2018 General Election was fragile and needed nurturing, and how the events of February 2020 undid the good work. The message before had always been reforms took time, but few imagined there would be so big a digression happening so soon.
The digression is happening because we have been too polite, too tame amid assaults over our democratic institutions. It is time to be not so tame and fight.
I would like to end this post by reproducing Usman Awang’s Sepatah Kata:
Sebuah perkataan yang paling ditakuti
Yang tradisional sekali
Untuk bangsa kita yang pemalu.
Sekarang kata ini kuajarkan pada anakku:
Kau harus jadi manusia kurangajar
Untuk tidak mewarisi malu ayahmu.
Lihat petani-petani yang kurangajar
Memiliki tanah dengan caranya
Sebelumnya mereka tak punya apa
Kerana ajaran malu dari bangsanya.
Suatu bangsa tidak menjadi besar
Tanpa memiliki sifat kurangajar.
