The thin blue line: Policemen making their pledge to serve the country and people during the Police Day celebration at the state’s contingent police headquarters in Lebuh Penang last March. — The Star
I don’t have the habit of making new year resolutions because I know how futile the exercise is. Pledging to eat less and exercise more tends to fall by the wayside given the many festivals that crowd around the first few months of the year. But I did make one resolution this time, which is that I won’t sweat the small stuff and will instead focus on the bigger more important things in life. I will try to be more positive, kinder, more generous and more creative. Those can be interpreted in any way you want.
But not everybody made this resolution. Hence, it’s only been a month, and some people are already wallowing in trivia, all in the name of righteousness. The police are being made to spend their time investigating a young reporter who allegedly asked a sensitive question to a foreigner who possibly didn’t know enough about our country to know how to answer it. I’m not sure what the offence was; a badly worded question, or the “crime” of embarrassing some people in front of a foreigner. As always, we fire an entire bazooka at a hapless reporter, an approach guaranteed to not endear him to the powers-that-be. This is the reformist government, right?
Then the police are asked to investigate a school where some young schoolkids were seen dancing wearing leggings. For some reason, this was considered so big an infraction that no less than our law enforcers had to pay a call. What law is being infringed on is uncertain. Showing legs on school premises, even though they were far from being bare? I rather miss the days when we girls wore shorts and sleeveless shirts for PE lessons. None of us became miscreants because of it.
Is this really the best use of our men and women in blue? Aren’t there bigger criminals to be pursued? Is this what they were trained for, to go after little kids and people who misspoke? Are they meant to peer into people’s hearts and divine whether they had bad intentions?
If they could do that, we would not have any crime at all. The police would be able to stop every robbery, rape, kidnapping and murder before they even happened because they would know in advance who would be about to commit them. Don’t we wish they had the ability to have insight into who was about to commit corruption? But I suppose, even if they did, they probably would not be able to do much since corruption almost always involves the very powerful.
While the general principle is that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, there are instances when our eyes and brains can already discern what is happening. Rather like how everyone can see what happened when that woman was shot dead in Minneapolis, we too can see clearly who the victims are. And just as how the US government is trying to cast the victim as the villain, here too we have similar cases.
Three years ago, an elderly man tried to protect some stray dogs from harsh local city council dogcatchers. In the process he was struck on the face by an enforcement officer using a metal loop pole, leaving him with injuries on the face and wrist.
You’d think the officers would be rushing to apologise to him because after all, this was a dog-catching effort, not a human one. Instead, the Uncle has been subjected to a three-year legal battle, despite CCTV footage clearly showing provocation and physical abuse by the officers. As a result, his health has suffered. Why was this necessary? Why the lack of compassion?
Taxpayer money is being used to pursue a case that could have been easily settled by an apology and some compensation. When did trying to protect animals become a crime? We have an Animal Welfare Act that punishes anyone for cruelty to animals. Just a month ago, a security guard was fined RM40,000 for abusing a cat. Yet when a human being abuses another, for trying to protect animals, they take the victim to court. Was it because in the first case, the abuser was a poor foreigner while in the second, the abuser was a uniformed local? Are we applying our laws selectively on different people?
(I do not buy the argument that a dogcatcher cannot ever be considered an abuser in his line of work. There are surely smarter and more compassionate ways of doing that job.)
So here we are in 2026 and it is the same old, same old. Why do we not put in any energy into doing things more intelligently, more wisely and more compassionately? Is it because there is no call from our leaders to do just that? Can’t they speak up on behalf of common sense, or just on right and wrong? Or are those concepts now merely a matter of interpretation?
This is the 2026 question. Try and have a good one nevertheless,everyone!
Marina Mahathir is wishing for a Mamdani, rather than a Madani. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.
