Lady Gaga and Elton John recently produced a song about unexpected encounters. It was part of the sound track for the animated movie Gnomeo & Juliet and goes something like this: “Hello Hello! My My My, What have we here?! What a surprise, what a surprise!”
It’s almost the first thing that came to mind when I saw the government’s allocation of funds for the needy under the 1Malaysia People’s Welfare Programme. This RM1.4 billion distribution will, as we all know, meet with opposing reactions.
Pro-Barisan folk would see this as proof of yet again how much Crew Najib actually cares for the country, how the government is doing its utmost to tackle poverty and inequality, how 1Malaysia isn’t merely fluff, how Barisan is the champion of social justice and so on. The Anti-Barisan group will point to how this is not even 10% of the amount allocated to the PM’s Office, how it’s grossly insufficient, how it’s an obviously pre-election ploy, how it does not address structural injustices in the country and that overall something stinks worse than a particular anus being examined in court.
All this ping-pong-ing is familiar; everyone more or less knows and expects. What very few know of (let alone care about) is how the trajectory of this debate actively assumes one main element – what the government is or isn’t doing – and quietly represses another i.e. how the people (also known as the ’demos’, the root of that famous word I know I don’t need to repeat here) can and should act.
Hello Hello – there could be something unMalaysian here.
Distributing goods to the poor is a noble act and one which any compassionate government cannot ignore; sadly it also could be a way of removing any discussion as to why certain parties have the power to distribute and others merely to receive. Giving money and aid to combat inequality is never a bad thing; it’s however also not the best thing if it further cements the most unequal divide between those who can choose to give or not and those who must rely on such gifts. Challenging the lacklustre (and politically motivated) subsidies by the Federal Government is a necessary dissensus by the Opposition; yet it’s not as powerful as the dissensus which questions why the people need to rely on hand-outs by a faulty and insidious form of representation by a supposed ’elite group’ in the first place.
Najib, as part of his donation speech, said that “The underprivileged represents a large group of the community and without government intervention, they will remain marginalised and we will have failed to uphold social justice” – My my my, what a surprise.
Even more surprising though, is why such a large group are called to accept a system in which they are reduced to the role of passive recipients and rendered (largely) invisible until either an election is forthcoming (which is once in about 3-4 years) or a Tan Sri needs to include more tax-deductible items in their business accounts (which is anytime they don’t have less self-centered things to do with their money, which is rare) or – Hello Hello – until a system emerges in which everybody takes responsibility for each other.
This would be a system in which we have true equality with one another. I mean a kind of equality in which every husband can afford to buy his wife and children a good meal – instead of what we have now where some husbands need to beg to feed their kids whilst others can get their wives diamond rings with price-tags that rival Air-Asia’s quarterly profits.
This would be a system in which charity representatives don’t need to go from restaurant to restaurant asking for donations (and mostly being dissed) because the community would’ve made a decision to include the orphans, the homeless and the physiologically challenged as part of the people and therefore will more than effectively provide for them. This would be a great improvement over a system where people taking care of an abandoned Down’s syndrome girl need to suffer the embarassment of disturbing hungry lunchers digging into their chicken rice in order to ask for donations; God forbid I must endure pictures of cerebral palsy children when a dripping drumstick is four inches away from my lips.
What kind of system would this (for now) imaginary one be? Would it be democracy? I doubt it, but even if it is it would be a very different kind of democracy than what Malaysia has now. Malaysian democracy is about various groups making demands about what they’re not getting, what they don’t have enough of, what other groups are depriving them of, what they should be getting, and so on. All of which gives the lie to ’1Malaysia’ or the idea of being "Malaysian first and something else second". Perhaps being Malaysian should be about transcending race but about including everybody, especially those who are “a part of no part” i.e. we will never be – and should never be – fully “Malaysian” until as a community we take care of the "least" of those among us?
Maybe it’s that we ’normal’ folks don’t truly see the ’abnormal’ folks as part of us, members of the national family. If a boy is spastic this is unfortunate but, well, it’s a fact of life, a social problem – which is another way of saying it’s not our problem. And if it’s not our problem, it will never be a ’political’ problem, a problem which makes demands of the system.
We are not fully Malaysians until there are no more ’homes for the disabled’ because the category of "DISABLED" would be abolished, not for lack of compassion but for lack of classificatory relevance. We are all part of the family. Some can walk faster, hold a pencil more easily or learn more things, but every one of us is one of us.
For this to happen – to return to an earlier theme – the people may have to choose to act instead of choosing other (supposedly more enlightened) people to act on their behalf. True democracy may requires us to gradually problematize the distinction between the governed and the governing, to challenge not simply the motives and amounts of distributions, but the very power to distribute.
Impossible? Lady Gaga doesn’t seem to think so. We can take her words to heart:
“Never gonna find… anything to change my mind?
Famous last lines of a fool.”
The Micah Mandate is a Christian-based public interest advocacy ministry that seeks a transformation of our nation through justice, mercy and humility.
