Malaysians common ground

Salam.

To address the issue of unity among Malaysia's multi-racial community we need to be able to identify the differences in Malaysia. Malaysians are always bombarded with the ideology of differences in race in Malaysia. As for example there are Malays, Chinese, Indians and other races and each race has their own rights to protect. Always in the newspaper the issue of Malay Special Rights and Privileges being played upon to enrage the Malay population. Not forgetting the historical Mei 1969 that can't never be forgotten. Other than these, the issue of religions are circulating from time to time as well to attract the attention of Malaysians that "Hey! You are a Malay and Muslim, and you are entirely different than a Chinese, Christian or an Indian Hindu."

Well as for me, after identifying the root of all of these differences, we need to look further and deeper into a more serious issue other than our physical differences in which none of us can do anything about it! Like what the late Tun Razak said after the 13 Mei tragedy, "the main issue for this tragedy is economic differences." And guess what, it is still the issue of the century in regards to Malaysian unity. This issue never changes!

After working out the 'fake' and 'can't do anything about it' differences between us Malaysians and learning the fact that since more than 50 years ago, economic differences have always been the root of the problem for us Malaysians to achieve unity, then we'll figure out what's our common ground. And it is simple, our common ground is economy.

Gathering as Malays won't do much difference because Malays are Malays. I respect Malays special privileges cause it's written in the constitution since the beginning of Malaysia. And I don't think the real issue is Malay privileges. If we want to talk about privileges, then let's do it openly and discuss on why should we have a number of different types of schools under our education ministry? What's the need to Chinese type school and Indian type school when we can all have one united Malaysian school and at the same time have Mandarin and Tamil taught as elective subjects? Why should we give privileges to these type of school? I don't really like talking about this but we shouldn't let our eyes and anger get focused on these 'small-small' issues but to set on the main, big and the only issue! The income gap between classes!

Income gap is across the race boundary, even if you're a Malay or Indian or of Iban ancestory, if you own more than 10k per month, all of you will still fall under the 'high income' class or the upper class. And even if you're a chinese or Indian, if you own only Rm500 per month then you falls into the low income or lower class. Hence what should we, as Malaysians talk about is this income gap. The need for our administration to concentrate more on bridging the income gap between our classes. This is because the larger the income gap gets, it means more trouble. Certainly we don't want only a small group of people or capitalist organisations getting richer and richer and let me tell you, this group of people don't even care whether they're Chinese, Malay or Indians. They will be satisfied as long as the money keeps coming in. At the end, it is us, the majority people that keep on fighting about races, colour differences, eating habits and stuffs. Well news for the Malay totok, if we address the issue from the income gap perspective, we will be doing the poor people a favour in helping them gain more income to go through daily lifes and let me ask you. In Malaysia, which race made up the majority of people from lower class? I bet even a primary school pupil can answer that.

Hence after all this discussion, will you still naively think that our problems are only caused by differences in races, skin colours and eating habits?

Selamat.