There is something wrong with our nation. Perhaps it is apathy, perhaps it is hopeless resignation, but the consequence is clear, we lack the will to improve our lives beyond a basic threshold.
There is no point blaming the people. The people lack a clear channel of communication with the government, to demand accountability for the government’s actions and in most cases, inaction. No point blaming the government, we elected it to power.
It is ridiculous to try to justify our apathy by resigning ourselves to a conclusion that the parties get re-elected term after term because they have us in a deadlock and barriers to entry are insurmountable, impossible for one man or a small group to change it or overcome it. The conclusive idea is ever present at the back of our minds, at the tip of our tongues, but our senseless apathy holds us back from ever turning it into action.
We forego the matter by claiming: we temporarily chose the lesser of the two evils, the two incompetents, the two corrupt. When we put the whole idea in a line, it looks laughably insane and ironic since it is a democratic country we claim to live in; that among the hundreds and thousands of gold medallists and university graduates that we bring out every year, we cannot make one group with one leader we can look at with hope, respect, love and faith – in terms of accountability, peace, progress, and harmony.
People may very well argue saying: it is too much to ask for at this point in our nation’s infancy; well it has been almost 42 years since we have been cowering from responsibility with the excuse of infancy.
The bottom line is, even if those goals are overly ambitious at this point, they are still irrefutably goals worth striving toward, if not by leaps and bounds then at least at a crawl. Even that has somehow become too much to ask for.
The wise and the affluent live their comfortable lives murmuring: “It is beneath us to get involved in politics, it is administered by unruly, wilful people who cannot and will not look beyond their own interests and we cannot hope to win against such men.” Sadly, they miss the whole point.
It is not politics we must involve ourselves in, it is the governing of our nation in the best way possible, by the best minds our country has to offer.
A fitting analogy would be Cinderella finally liberating herself from the evil clutches of her stepmother and sisters, and marrying Prince Charming only to discover that the prince is an unfaithful abusive, self-centred maniac, and what does Cinderella do?
She resigns herself to daily abuse murmuring: “It is impossible to fix this because I simply cannot muster the courage and strength to stand up to him and bring harmony back to my life.” Cinderella is just as much to blame as the prince. It is sheer naïveté to hope that everything will work out for our nation, when we, through our apathy, forsake it to corruption and incompetence.
Terms such as government, civil servant, police, national institution and politics, have become cruel mockeries of their true definitions and it is understood that things have to turn really ugly for them to change for the better; things have turned as hopelessly ugly as it can ever be, for we have made international headlines over nothing short of mass murder and it is time we stopped blaming vague and distant institutions like the government, put our foot down and did something about it.
By doing something about it, I don’t mean simply donating bags of blood and raising funds for the families of the deceased, or injured; of course we must do these, it is a given.
Doing something involves much more than that, otherwise it’d be no different from allowing your toddler to play with sharp objects in the house every morning and bandaging him up every evening.
You can educate the toddler to avoid sharp objects altogether, but if that seems too much to expect from a mind as infantile as his, then you should baby-proof his room or the entire house if possible. We as a nation need to stop patting ourselves on the back for simply bandaging the wounds of our nation, it’s time we baby-proofed it, infantile as it claims to be.
We need to demand accountability for incompetence and corruption, for mindless violence and senseless negligence, place counter measures against potential disasters and vigilantly enforce the maintenance of such measures.
Complacency on our part will only provide incentive to people in power to be complacent in turn. We must be aware of the problem at its core and prioritise solving it above fixing its multi-faceted symptoms. There is something wrong with our nation and it is time we did something about it.
Ishtiaque Mahmud is a Journalist.
