On Parentage, Pride and Patriotism

In last Tuesday's class, we were given the question if "If you are not proud of your parents, will you still love them?". This is a very hard to answer question for me, because I come from a traditional / typical Chinese family. In a traditional Chinese household, we rarely talks about touchy feely things like "love", instead we like to debate about the economies, sports, politics, religions, in fact we will discuss just about anything but love. (I could be generalizing here, but sila beruang dengan saya, thank you.) To answer the question, my answer would be yes, because family is something you don't get to choose, without them, I would not exist, and this blog would have to write itself.

However, if you can read between the line, this question really has nothing to do with family at all, it has everything to do with something on a much larger scale, a country. A country is a strange concept, it is mankind's feeble attempt to lay claim on the land they live on, lines we draw on maps to designate which land are yours and which are mine. On the grand scale of things, we are but a speck of dust in the universe, our existence last for a mere blink of an eye, so sometimes I can't help but wonder: why do we even bother? But I digress.


Cosmic Calendar by bayruya

Anyway, until we had the technologies to terraform Mars, these small pieces of land are all we had, which is why we treasured them so much, hence patriotism, the love we have for these small pieces of land we called our country. Within each country there exist a government, whose job is to make sure all everyday activities goes on smoothly for as long as we exist. But we are imperfect being and our society is imperfect, so our government, made up of elected representative of the people, by nature a product of the society, will also be imperfect. Sometimes these imperfect politicians tend make a mess, and it make us all look bad.

So far, everything sounds pretty simple and logical, right? Then, a very funny thing happened... we began to mistook government for country. Like I mention before in my first post, these are tough times to be a Malaysian, so what the question is actually asking is "If you are not proud of your country, will you still love it?"

The answer is of course yes, even though I am not proud of how things are NOW (note that the keyword is "now"), I still love our country and I want things to better in the future. Government and political parties are merely a small part of our country, they may come and go, some might overstay their welcome, some might pander to the popular opinion to get vote, but all of them have one common similarity which is that their time will eventually pass, their petty politicking will become outdated and irrelevant one day, but the land, the culture, and most importantly the people will still be there and it is the latter that I love, not the former.

Now I understand it might sounds like I consider the political and the cultural component two completely different things that have no effect on each other whatsoever, however that is not true at all. I believe the two components are closely intertwined, one simply cannot exist without the other. As I have said before, our political problem rooted from our society, all the revolutions / reformations in the world cannot save our country if our people, the Malaysians, cannot learn to be more civic-minded.

In conclusion, I believe our country is still worthy of our love. However, love alone is not enough, we must recognize the problems in our society and start to make things right again.

P/S: Did you know that in mathematical term, a revolution means 360 degree? Oh the irony!