Despondent at the end or beginning of hope

 

From Akhramsyah Muammar Ubaidah Sanusi

It is easy to be disgusted to see what is happening to our country. The whole world is suffering, but where others move forward, despite the misery, even sprinting with hope in the all too short periods when the pandemic eases about them, we remain confused and directionless.

It is also easy to partake in the common hobby of our people, pointing fingers at those we blame for our suffering. The politicians, both in power or deprived of it, being those often pilloried. Also those in power by station, by job, by role, and now, ultimately, also by birth.

It is not so easy it seems to channel the anger now brewing among us into something more. Resignation and apathy seem easier paths for many, helpless and increasingly penniless. We crave the stability we have now lost, forgetting how ungrateful we were when we once had it.

We have little choice really, easy or not. Now our future seems to rest in the hands of nine gentlemen so detached from our daily lives that it should be easier to fear or despise them. But we are so driven by desperation that so many hope, while also confused as to what really we should hope for.

Whatever happens at the Istana where too few of our citizens will ever tread in the coming day or so, we cannot allow ourselves to continue to believe that our fate is in the hands of others. We have now been reduced to laying hope for the future on the nine monarchs.

The world is laughing at us with pity.

Are we so bereft of ideas, an entire people, that all we can do is blame, argue and ponder at what others should do for us? There has to be more to being what we are than the food that supposedly unites us, now so distant as we remain caged in our homes, away from the haunts of our friendships.

This is meant to be cathartic only so far and now is the time that this prose should turn to uplift, but we are scarred, restless, helpless, and within an inch of hopelessness. It is perhaps best to end by declaring that what we have now is just not good enough and craving our past glories, unproductive.

It is best to end by sharing one thing that we all realise but struggle to articulate, that we cannot remain this way.

Our nation will fail, as our people perish and our children are left destitute. But change cannot be so limited as to be satisfied with what nine of the most privileged decide for us in days to come.

It is best that whatever happens on the day that is to come be the end of our beginning rather than be the beginning of our end. - FMT

Akhramsyah Muammar Ubaidah Sanusi is an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.