We need to get angry!

Opinion

Like choosing between having your eggs scrambled or poached, making a choice when I face a fork in the road is sometimes easy, and sometimes the hardest thing I could ever do.

As I grow up, I realise that life is a series of choices. Sometimes you make the right one, other times you make a horrible one and sometimes you hold out on making one and try to pretend that it’s not there. Doesn’t work, but you try.

Choices lead to freedom. And personal freedom, in essence, is how I choose to live my life. Accountable and responsible for, and to, myself, first and foremost.

Lately, my thoughts on freedom have evolved into what I now feel to be one of the most historically beautiful words in the English language: Liberty.

Defined as “freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions,” in instances of “power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice”, I often feel that somewhere along the way, we may have forgotten this.

As a person, I, like you, have experienced, made mistakes, met the wrong people, met the wrong person, been bruised, been scarred, bruised and scarred others, met the right person and didn’t know it, loved, lost, felt pain, was angry, lost track — in short, we lived.

As a country, though, I have been pondering, often gravely, on what has happened to our liberty. Our “freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions” — where is it?

We fight, yes, but what are we fighting for, really? I hear “democracy” being bandied about and to a level, we have that. But it is liberty I seek, the “unwarranted or impertinent freedom in action or speech” — so powerful yet so lacking.

I read there could be an uprising in Malaysia akin to Egypt, that the conditions were ripening, and it could just take a good, hard shove to jerk people of this country into action.

I have yet to decide whether I want to see this happen, but what I know I do want to see happen, is for us to get angry. As a citizen, I am not angry enough. As a nation, we are not angry enough.

So get angry. Get angry for freedom and liberty in a personal and national sense. This is not only about rights or democracy. This is about a fountain springing from inside you. Enough fountains will make a waterfall powerful enough to bring change.

Get angry about the flawed public education system which seems to be a test bed of sorts for government policies; keep demanding the preservation of actual, factual history; keep calling for the growth of local art and music on the national agenda; keep reminding everyone that sex workers have rights too; keep shouting for the actual practice of democracy; and keep the honest dialogues to understand religions present in Malaysia.

Liberty — a very personal journey; and when shared, will be the ultimate realisation that will truly unite us as a nation.

Shamini served as a news journalist for some years and now works as a media and communications manager at a private university. When she's not stabbing furiously at her computer, she's in a bar somewhere drinking in great music or at home devouring her favourite authors. She can be reached at sdkalie7@gmail.com.