Let’s roar, not whimper

It’s time for the 40- and 50-somethings to stick their necks out and take the lead.

COME Sunday, it will be the first day of the Lunar New Year and it will be the start of the Year of the Tiger according to the Chinese 12-animal zodiac. This also means that this is my year as my zodiac sign is that of the Tiger.

This also means that I am 48 years old as I have gone through this cycle four times and the next time the tiger year comes around, I will be 60.

Over the past year, I have been brooding and dreading the coming of 2010 as it can only mean that I am going past mid-life still stuck in a crisis and it is going downhill after that.

However, as the Lunar New Year draws nearer, I find the gloom lifting and the rush of a new vigour of energy – it is as if I have gotten a shot of artificial booster to overcome anything that may stand in my way.
Maybe, this burst of adrenaline has got something to do with the fact that it has been over 40 days since I last had a cigarette, but I would like to think that the pending arrival of the Golden Tiger is responsible for my enthusiasm.

Those of us born in the 1960s are the country’s pioneers and I make no apology for this sweeping statement. We were the first lot to go through the change from English schools to Sekolah Kebangsaan.

We were the first to memorise and sing all those patriotic songs like Tanah Melayu, Malaysia Berjaya, Putera-Puteri, Barisan Kita and Muhibbah. We sang those songs with fervour and gusto although most of us did not understand the full meaning of those songs.

We were all schoolchildren when the race riots of May 13, 1969, broke out. It was our loss of innocence; suddenly we referred to each other in ethnic terms – most of the time in the rudest possible way. Overnight, we were a multi-racial country when prior to that we were just Malaysians.

Did we, children of the 1960s, have a choice in any of these things? No, we did not. The policies that followed and came about after May 13, changed our lives. Everything we did and were done to us was supposedly based on these policies by the people entrusted to implement them.

Sadly, today many of us realise that the implementers somewhat lost the plot along the way and carried out their duties over-enthusiastically and, in some cases, not in the spirit in which the policies were drawn up.

When we were old enough to realise that many of us had suffered at the hands of these zealots, we were so brow beaten that we, then the youth of the 1970s, just meekly accepted our misfortunes and avoided any confrontation when seeking our rights.

Instead, our parents found alternative routes and pathways for us. It was the same, regardless of we being Malay, Chinese or Indian, because then we left things to our parents to decide not knowing that they too were also experiencing these things for the first time.

For the non-Malay parents, they just drew on what they thought their fathers and mothers would have done – they prepared many of us to feel as though we were not going to stay on in Malaysia forever – they prepared us to be migrants.

For the Malays, because of the distrust created by the actual May 13 event and the propaganda that followed, the parents prepared the children to live without their non-Malay neighbours.

It would be easy for us today, with the benefit of hindsight, to judge everyone then – although some of us still cannot see clearly and are blinded by self-interest.

Then came the 1980s – the boom time for the world, where getting rich was the name of the game. We, the baby boomers, were just too busy making money to care about where Malaysia was heading or that there was a parallel economy in the country then.

Malaysia was flying high then but when we came crashing back to earth in the late 1990s the so-called Malaysian Dream was shattered. We left it to the politicians to resolve the problems, but instead they brought all of us into deeper conflict.

A decade later the same characters continued to dominate our lives when they should have faded away like bad nightmares.

We, who were born in the 1960s, are now fathers and mothers of children in their teens and twenties – the ages where their futures and thoughts are shaped.

In many ways they are luckier than us. They are more enlightened, and they also have more enlightened parents. The children born in the 1990s know what they want, and they know how to get it.

Unlike our parents, we must now stand up for them to ensure that none of them are deprived of anything that is rightly theirs. In a world where a country of 27 million is considered a small one, we must ensure not a single child of the 1990s is deprived at all. We are rich enough – in wealth and knowledge – to support everyone.

The May 13 incident brought about the New Economic Policy to ensure the fair distribution of wealth. I believed the policy is now outdated. I think Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak agrees with me because he will soon unveil the New Economic Model (NEM).

But this time as parents – not as politicians or technocrats – we must watch over the NEM policies like hawks to ensure that these are implemented as the authors meant them to be. We must be brave enough to shout out if we find any weakness in the implementation, and ensure it is fixed immediately.

We, the children of the 1960s, owe it to our forefathers to make sure the NEM works and ensure that their descendants will thrive in their homeland. No one should be made unwelcome. No Malaysian should be referred to as an immigrant anymore nor should any Malaysian feel threatened by another.

If we get it right, there is more than enough in Malaysia for everybody.

This is the year of the Golden Tiger and it is time for Malaysia and its people to roar.

Source: The Star Friday 12, 2010
> Deputy Executive editor Wong Sai Wan is going to miss his son when he leaves for Melbourne next week but prays that he will have a great Malaysia to come back to.