Finding fairness

Measured by gini index, Malaysia is now Asia’s most unequal society ( more than even famously unfair countries like India and China). 

The latest model BMWs you spotted in BSC, non-halal 12-course dinners and the lavish lifestyles of denizens of Damansara are an alien world apart from the majority of citizens in the Klang Valley : families of despatch riders, supermarket cashiers and lowly paid government servants returning home to their squalid flats with many large mouths to feed. 

Ever since moving into KL’s urban space in increasing numbers in the 1960s and 1970s the Malays (unlike the crowd-loving Chinese and Indians) have never felt totally at home in the city. 

Cut off from the security and support of their kins and kinds in the Kampongs the Malays suffer from what the French sociologists termed Anomie and what Germans called Angst. 

Poverty, cultural disconnect, urban tension and the mental walls imposed by a Government-sponsored religion are potent ingredients for an incendiary social cocktail.

Understanding their pain and our compassion and kindness to one another is what our country needs now.

Caring for our poor, dispossessed and hungry no matter what race they are or what God they believe in is what truly matters. This is what will hopefully one day make Malaysia fair, multicultural and more equal.

Lately Malaysians have been spiraling into a vicious quarrel about whether this country should finally sign up to its United Nations obligations under The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). Bizarrely but not so surprisingly, Malaysia along with North Korea and Myanmar are the only noteworthy nations left in the world that haven’t signed. 

ICERD is just another aspirational announcement by governments around the world to each other on their lofty intentions about vague and vogueish subjects like world peace, stopping climate change and freeing Palestine. These are not things for us common folks to worry about or fight each other for.

Plainly in such times of mass pain, hunger and ignorance, ICERD is absurd.

Kerk Boon Leng