Friday, January 11, 2008

A Coin has THREE Sides!

Most people in the world live with the idea that there are two sides to a coin. Many are even taught this in school. Unfortunately, this is patently untrue. Believing in such lies will only get one into trouble. There are at least three sides to a coin: look to the picture on the right for the truth.

With recent events, we have seen the shadow of growing Islamisation, enveloping our nation. There are plenty of such examples, like the recent intellectual property claim on the word Allah by some idiots in our Government. But this problem isn't only happening at home. For some unknown reason, there is a gradual creep of increased religious piety worldwide. For example, Christian extremists in the USA are challenging evolution with intelligent design and believe that they are a Christian nation. Sigh, where are the centrists?

I tried to do my bit recently, on the blog of our opposition leader. A parent had written to him, to ask for advice, and he decided to politicise the issue for no good reason. I found that fairly irresponsible. The issue was about the school principal madating the prefects to wear a songkok as part of their uniform. As a Chinese Christian family, the parent felt that this was an attack on their race/religion. From many of the comments, you can tell that most people see it in the same way.

I tried to point out the fact that it was not a race/religion issue, but an issue of personal freedom. I asked one comment, how wearing a songkok is against the 10 commandments as none of them mention attire, and got called an agnostic. I asked another, if the male prefects had been mandated to wear skirts to school instead, would it be a gender issue, and got called illogical. I find this fairly comical as I've also been called the exact opposite. Seems like I must have hit a nerve.

The thing that I find sad is that most Malaysians will see this issue as a race/religion issue. I cannot blame them as we have been conditioned from young to see everything through the lens of race/religion. As a result, politics in Malaysia will not change. Our National Front (BN) will continue to rule by divide-and-conquer and our Opposition will exploit exactly the same thing. On the surface, it does involve race/religion as the songkok is a Malay traditional head wear and Malays are, by definition, muslims. But dig deeper, and you'll see that it's a crime of stupidity, not hate.

I have always hoped that our Opposition will grow up and handle real issues. I have blogged about this many times before. The problem with Malaysia is that, through the many decades of conditioning, our fellow countrymen have become mostly bigots. The centre is growing thin and crumbling. When the centre becomes too thin, the coin falls over.

When that happens, as a nation, we are so screwed.

3 comments:

Gabriel Wu said...

a mobius strip has one. and so does a klein bottle ;)

qian said...

It's an inspiring post. =)

Wan Qian

Shawn Tan said...

gab: I had to look them up on wikipedia, u math geek!

qian: Merci beaucoup. (=