Everybody should question
February 13th, 2009 | by Sean |Nobody should question
When I first came to Malaysia in 2005, I was eager to find out more about the country I was going to live in, the country my wife was born in and soon our children were to be born in. We were staying with in-laws for the birth of our daughter; they had the New Straits Times (NST) delivered every day. I was thrilled to bits when I first opened the newspaper, the articles were hilarious! It was only after I read 2 or 3 editions that I realised the NST isn’t a satirical work.
The phrase “nobody should question” (or variations) seems to be a common theme in the articles I read in some media. My own view is that this is a very basic error in the mind of an individual living in a democratic society. Democracy is ‘rule by the people’, which is not just a once-every 5 years trip to the polling booth, followed instantly by a complete abdication of responsibility for whatever happens as a result of the election. ‘Rule by the people’ is a continuing responsibility on all members of a society to work for its improvement.
Why ask questions?
In order to improve, it’s important to identify what can be improved, what our expectations are (when it will be improved by and by how much it will improve), who should effect / contribute the improvements and possibly even why we think it the improvements are needed. Those factors are all questions: ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how much’, ‘who’ and ‘why’. These are by no means an exhaustive list of questions – business people build careers on branded systems of ‘Improvement’, each with their own variations, but all using questioning as a starting point.
Don’t worry about looking stupid – that only happens when you ask the wrong question, but there’s every chance you’ll still get the right answer. I did that recently on Anil Netto’s excellent journalism site. There was a proposal for Nizar Jamaluddin (the controversially ousted Menteri Besar / Chief Minister) of the Perak State Government to contest a local seat in a by-election caused by the death of the previous minister. I am largely ignorant of the mechanics of Malaysian politics, so I asked why this was a good idea:
My question on anilnetto.com
And Anil replied! He’s my new online hero, just as Nizar is in real life (the ‘Barack Obama gag’, under pressure, was marvellous). My question was prompted by concern that Nizar occupying 2 seats would somehow undermine his own (recently diminished) majority. But as Anil points out, one seat is at the state level, the other in parliament. But – waidaminnit – presumably these are full time jobs? How is he going to excel at two full time jobs, the way Pakatan Rakyat really need to excel, if they’re going to win the votes of the rakyat? I’ll ask this question here, just so nobody gets tired of my questions. Maybe there’s a good answer that everyone (but me) knows already. If you’re one of the people who know, let me know will you?
I know I said this blog would be about Free Open Source Software in politics, so I’m going to have to crowbar something in, as this article has been utterly irrelevant so far. This blog is made possible by WordPress, and I’m writing this article in a tab in the Firefox web browser, running on Xubuntu – a linux distribution. All free and legal! Oh and the picture above was captured by the Gimp – a powerful image editing program.