In exactly one hour from the beginning of this blog post, the country that I live in, Malaysia will be turning 53. And every year at the end of the month, we find ourselves reminded of what it really means to be patriotic. None of us really know.
I've never 'celebrated' Hari Merdeka (Independence Day) by sticking with a crowd of several tens of thousands to watch a ten minute display of air-polluting fireworks not because I'm a wet blankie but I am part of the generation which celebrates independence day our own way. We don't fly flags on the rooftops of our cars two weeks before the 31st comes because we fear that the flag will get drenched in the rain. Besides, have you ever really thought of what happens to the mini-flags post-merdeka day?
I grew up in a school which taught us that the Malaysian flag should never be allowed to touch the ground so as to not dirty it. It was a rule we held on to, even inside our hearts, and even to this day. We find our own way to remind ourselves and the people around us that independence day is really a day to be celebrated.
For starters, we pay our taxes and summonses as required because 1. we owe it to the government to do our duty and 2. It was our fault anyways and it beats submitting to paying a less hefty fine to get out of trouble aka bribery.
We also don't litter or vandalise government property.
We don't eat our lunches in front of our muslim friends during the fasting month.
We don't tell people to go back to their home country just because we are so powerful we don't get in trouble when we say it out loud OR we're drunk in a parliament session.
We don't make insulting rap songs just to prove a point. That's Namewee's job.
We don't call our friends immigrants, even though we all are. Only Orang Asli's are the real owners of the land that are theirs no longer, politically at least.
Note: I use 'we' throughout the whole post because I'd like to believe that I am not alone. Which I am not.
Call me optimistic. We don't care. We get to pray to our Gods in a country where everyone understands that other people have their own Gods to pray to. We don't crucify others for being different. We don't force others to conform to our religions and practices either.
That would have been what our forefathers would have wanted for us to do. To cherish the aftermath of a fight for freedom in a time when we had more reason to hate each other and fight each other, but instead, we stuck with each other through thick and thin, followed 1party to freedom and formed a whole new nation on Dataran Merdeka on this very day 53 years ago.
I wish that we have not forgotten like many other things that we have lost memory of that Tunku Abdul Rahman called Merdeka seven times, not three. And that's the truth because there were thousands of witnesses who heard him and saw him raise his hand to the sky to declare that we are free of colonial rule, that we are free to walk the streets with our heads held high, that we can be called 'citizens' for the very first time after milleniums of being the trophy of conquests, to die by the hundreds of thousands in senseless war brought on by reckless greed and the need to bully and control the weak and defenseless.
I wish that we do not forget our friends in Sabah and Sarawak who joined us on the 16th of September and truly forming Malaysia as we know it now, who celebrate merdeka with the people on Tanah Melayu because they fought their own wars against war-bringers with their own agendas.
And I wish that we do not forget the many who have died to set us free. We may not know their names or even pronounce them correctly. They may be of Malaysian blood; they may be of foreign blood but there are those who did their part in securing our homeland for us, consciously or not. We remember them by naming streets, landmarks, monuments, schools, universities, megastructures after them... lest we forget.
And there are many who forget. Because forgetting is easy, appreciating is too damn hard.
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