DO you fancy an 18-year-old as your elected representative in Parliament? Our habit is to talk down to teenagers, but you can’t do that to a Yang Berhormat. Will a teenage MP be a game-changer or is he or she more likely to get sucked into the established game?
Religious education, whether public or private, weekday or Sunday, is directed at making youths compliant. So they are likely to be conformist, and political parties are waiting to suck them in to boost their numbers and use them to hook young voters.
But a lotus can emerge from dirty water. Malaysia needs a turnaround from gladiator politicking to holistic governance, from racial sneering to global caring, and from religious narrow-mindedness to a universal spirituality. Malaysia could one day produce a Greta Thunberg: this 16-year-old Swedish girl is leading European teenagers in a continent-wide protest against climate damage caused by government inaction.
Teenage MPs offer some hope if they use their influence on Gen Z to abandon the old ways and adopt a fresh approach.
At Klang Methodist Girls School on a recent Saturday morning, Interact Club members under their teacher’s supervision cleared the school compound of discards and went on to sweep the area surrounding their school. Klang MGS is now an oasis of cleanliness. Cleanliness in Malaysia beyond tourist-frequented city centres has long gone down the drain.
It is not only on the climate front that Malaysians need to abandon their old ways. Our religious affiliations have been exploited by insular preachers to make us think that God confers exclusive privileges on “us” believers and not on “them” the unbelievers. We go to heaven: they don’t. No belief is more globally destructive than this, for it sets all religions against one another.
Are youngsters not weary of seeing religions fight like gladiators in theological battles resulting from interpretations of scripture that are twisted out of context to make them confrontational till this day? They should be tired of such combat, and perhaps one day a 16-year-old schoolgirl can stand up in KL and preach a mode of spirituality that is dynamically inclusive without putting down any religion as lacking in truth.
What is the connection between religion and spirituality? They are like caterpillar and butterfly. Religion is a caterpillar that sticks to one tree. Your way forward is to mature into a butterfly. As a caterpillar you can only have one religious affiliation, one tree that you cling to. As a butterfly you get to know that every tree supports the caterpillars living on it and you become appreciative of all trees. To appreciate the truth in all religions, you must emerge as a butterfly and not remain as a caterpillar.
Insular preachers – seasoned “know all” elders – will bully you into living your entire life as a caterpillar, because they refuse to grow wings themselves and don’t want you to be a flight lieutenant. Will our teenage MPs dare to break loose from this psycho-prison, start a mindset revolution, and convert the gladiator arena into a peace stadium?
Who can tutor our young MPs in spirituality? The orang asli. Seek them out before their culture disappears with the vanishing forests. Orang Asli are part of a worldwide web of shrinking hunter-gatherer tribes. These aboriginals preferred to remain part of nature, while other tribes urbanised till they reached civilisational level about 7,000 years ago (civilisation means “living in cities”).
But while aboriginal societies have survived for 300,000 years, civilised societies are already facing possible mass destruction through human-induced climate change. These past 4,000 years have also been marked by severe religious warfare that still rages on. How did the primitive tribes survive for 300,000 years if not for a deep spirituality that connected them to one another as brethren of a universal faith in nature?
Teenagers should make a pilgrimage to the land of orang asli. As their induction into political office, they should learn how to read the aboriginal Word of God deeply inscribed in the codes and scripts of nature.
The writer champions interfaith harmony. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
