What 100 years mean

Malaysia Day celebration at Stadium Merdeka on Sept 16, 1963. A centenarian would have witnessed this, among others. — National Archive Malaysia

THE number 100 has been in the news lately. It’s a good round number with many connotations and people have many different ways of interpreting it.

A 100-year-old person is called a centenarian, though some people have also called this 100-year-old a centurion, which means “the commander of a century (a group of one hundred) in the ancient Roman army”. Such a person may be old but not quite that old.

Still, when you think about it, 100 years is a long time. In that time, a centenarian would have gone through the Second World War, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the independence of many colonised countries, the rapid development of some of those countries and the development of civil wars in others, the fall of the Berlin War, the break up of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the rise of technology, especially the Internet.

Just imagine, 100 years ago cars were still big, bulky things and today we have cars that can drive themselves. In 1925 the few people who had telephones used what was known as a candlestick telephone with a separate earpiece and mouthpiece. Today the mobile phone is ubiquitous, sometimes outnumbering the populations of countries because some people have more than one.

Indeed, today that little metal thing in your pocket is a computer that contains your entire life and everything you want to know (but do not necessarily need to know) in the world. A century ago, people carried money in bags to go and buy things; today you can zap money to someone else across the world in a matter of seconds with that little metal thing.

These are just some of the things that 25-year-olds today take for granted. But if you are a centenarian, you would have witnessed the sweep of time and all the changes that have occurred in those years. The challenge is to keep up with those changes that sometimes come at blinding speed. That would only be possible with an open mind that accepts that the world will change, sometimes for the better and sometimes not.

Yet we see some people determined to throw the world back into a time which looked rosy for those who could take advantage of the changes but not for others. There are still folk who think that oppression and repression is the way to control human beings.

That might have been possible 100 years ago when people had very little access to information. But today you can watch a genocide being livestreamed with images that can break even the most hardened. Yet oppressors still think that’s a viable policy.

Today’s humans are different from their ancestors 100 years ago, even if they may not have ever suffered the deprivations of those times.

There are new deprivations that have been invented, sometimes with advanced technologies, including those that threaten the right to life and the right to live with dignity. These too need to be fought and those basic rights defended.

The trouble is while people have gone through change because of access to education, better health and higher living standards, their leaders need not necessarily have moved at the same pace. This is why sometimes we see policies handed down that seem to belong in the last century. For example, that war solves everything. That killing people, including your own, keeps power in the hands of the chosen few.

Such ideas and policies may not always be violent but are nevertheless insidious. For example, trying to control certain officials so that they will always work in the favour of the powerful. You would think in 2025, this would be retired into the history books but no, people still try it.

It’s happening all over the world. In the United States, the self-proclaimed most advanced and greatest country in the world, not only has its government managed to force corporations, lawyers, universities, the media, and judges to kowtow to those in power but have even made them pay for the privilege. People are being taken off the streets and “disappeared”. The country has exited many multilateral organisations, except for the United Nations, while also cutting off funding to many institutions. This is going back to the last century’s isolationist policies, and yet the country’s administration seems to think these are brand new ideas. When you don’t have a sense of history and don’t know the lessons from it, this is what happens.

In our country, some of the same thinking prevails. Our people apparently can be persuaded by simply giving us RM100 and yet another public holiday.

In the days when RM100 was a lot of money, that might have meant something. But I wonder what the rationale was to give every single person with a MyKad aged above 18 the same amount to buy groceries with. Did that money come from our taxes so we’re just getting a small refund? Or is it coming from somewhere else? Given that we are RM1.3 trillion in debt already, questions arise in my mind. If the idea is to genuinely help the rakyat, why give it to everybody, and why is it only a one-off?

Furthermore, in a country that already has so many public holidays, do we really need another one? Is it just for this year, which is not a particularly special one, or is it for every year?

One hundred years ago people may have been grateful for any handouts but today we know that such giveaways are rarely truly free. There is something we must give in return. It’s probably our acquiescence, our silence, and most importantly, our votes. Will it work? Only if our calendars and clocks go backwards.

Marina Mahathir is trying to think of 100 things to buy with her RM100. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.