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Saturday 20 September 2008

Enforcement And Abuse

This Race Relations Act has got to be the most freaking-stupid-thing I've heard in a while.

One thing's for sure. Pinky and the Brain (or lack thereof) never fail to cook up elaborately asinine ideas.

We have lived together for over 50 years. At some point, we learned to give and take. We've survived through racist policies like the NEP.

And you think we need an Act to keep us in line?

No Act or Law in the world can protect anyone, if it is abused or enforced unjustly.

You and I know how good the BN government is at the 'divide and rule' policy, and abusing every Law in sight.

4 comments:

walla said...

9754 is a good number (for those who know cantonese ;P) to buy for 4D tomorrow. That's also the number of petitioners for the release of the three: http://tinyurl.com/4ewu2v

Instructive is if you scroll the list, something will dawn on your mind, doesn't it?

If you say the malays hide their names, then you will have to ask why.

The nagging thought is this: even what is right and wrong is drawn along the race line. It cannot be that most of one group is so wrong that almost all of the other group must be right, innit? And if you say many of the other group actually mask their names and therefore their support in the guise of the first group, ask why.

So is there hope for this race relations act? Especially when the minister announcing it was also the guy one of whose departments went around locking people up on suspicions of being threats to national security, when at least two you can name from his party are still running around like loose cannons?

And this same party has just made a pre-transition transition. The PM takes on defense. Where's the threat, one asks? Are we being invaded by locusts, or illegal immigrants perhaps? Or is the threat from one's own long-suffering near-mad rakyat? Meanwhile, given a regal military send-off with praises showering like summer rain, his deputy takes up finance. This the guy under whose administration billions were lost in the lumut contract and a double-digit millions were paid as commission for a submarine deal. So come monday, this DPM will join the other minister of finance who has had the dubious record of losing billions in forex trading while at BNM. Two ministers of finance with highly insalubrious record of misperformance helming the most important ministry of this land during a time of almost financial crisis and runaway national deficit while the rakyat are suffering from day to day. Elsewhere, one of Japan's ministers resigned - all because they found some rice moldy. What a difference! If our felicitous umno ministers were to be appointed ministers in nipponland tomorrow, would anyone think they would not be politely asked to do the needful in a ceremonial but honorable send-off of another kind the day after? Say, with a sharp katana?

So with that out of the gut, we come back to race relations. If as we observe even what is right or wrong is defined along racial lines, how will this proposed Act help in bridging the gap and reducing the yawning chasm that even Dr Jones will hesitate to use his leap of faith to cross after his tangle with Last Crusade?

In fact, how do you apply punitive measures as was broached by the minister if people not only don't follow its uplifting spirituality but use their umno membership card or umnoputra privilege card to thumb their noses at the sensitivity of other races in order to appear superior, special and supreme? And are allowed to get away with it by the very people who propound the idea of this Act? So how to apply, by the tail of the row?

You get all sorts of policies and the ways they have been interpreted and then implemented which are plain unfair, unjust and crude - and they want to bring people closer - so that if someone makes a noise about such injustices, now they will say they're threats to national security? Did this cross the mind of his excellency(cough)? Small wonder we are left with two pebbles for the loss of an entire rock.

Meanwhile you go back to national school. One race banters with another but only as one clique to the clique of the another. Furthermore, the content of the conversations are somehow different one from the other. Why is that so? And then you read the reason given yesterday for why two maths and one moral papers must be held on the same day for the SPM exam coming up when the moral papers invariably taken by that other group can be moved to the next day along the time of the islamic paper taken by the first group. The reasons are the timetable has been approved and the question papers have been printed. You can print the amended date in a new box over the first pages? When people do things like this, the first impression is that they don't give a shit for the condition of schoolchildren of roots different from theirs. What if they had adopted such children themselves?

And soon enough they will flipflop back to using the national language for science and maths. The immediate reaction will be another massive reversion. Parents of youknowwho will transfer their children to vernacular schools whose standards of science and maths are already higher by four years. Race relations? Those blinkered idiots can't even handle education.

How can we not talk about race when this proposed Act is making it official that race is the root of all divisions that the proposer has left in disarray for the last half a century? If anything, Umno is not qualified to talk about race relations. They have been the cause of race dis-relations. They are the problem, and because they cannot change, they are not the solution.

It's too late anyway. The rakyat have suffered enough. To each his own then.

Anonymous said...

Will UMNO members be exempt from the Act? If not, no need to worry UMNO polis will never prosecute all those BN members who break the law anyway.

Anonymous said...

I enjoy your posts very much Crankshaft! Keep up with the good stuff :)

http://thedandelions.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/pak-lah-leave-a-legacy-leave-rpk-alone/#comment-2188

Crankster said...

Walla, you're right. There's no way there will be any semblance of justice within this Act.

To begin with, Ahmad Ismail and Khir Toyo are still free after trying to stir tensions while other innocent people have been thrown under the ISA.

Anon - my point exactly. UMNO members will be exempt from action.

MissJolie, thanks! I read The Dandelions quite often as well, though I don't always comment.