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| Republished from New Straits Times, Sep 10, 2021, with the author’s permission. Read the original here. |
AS WE LOOK back at what our country has achieved in the last 64 years, there’re certainly many triumphs and also failures that we may as well not dwell on, lest they bring us more heartaches.
We could’ve achieved much more. So it’s best to look to the future as Soyen Shaku, a Japanese Zen monk, discovered when he found a way out of past failures by saying, “Do not regret the past, look to the future”.
Perhaps this is akin to the popular saying of no use crying over spilt milk.
Much has happened in our beloved country, especially in the past two years or so. Besides the arduous health and economic challenges, we’ve also been treated to a giant spectacle of political upheavals and manoeuvring on a scale we’ve never seen before.
The familiar refrain of “where do we go from here?” is often heard among those who care about the future of this land we call home.
While we’ve been engrossed in much political infighting, some neighbouring countries that had once lagged behind have even overtaken us.
Take our automobile industry, for example, which we had often boasted about when we got off the starting blocks as early as 1985.
But we’ve not made much headway since then, especially in selling our wares to big international markets, except for making millions of Malaysians happy with their relatively cheap locally made vehicles compared with competing overseas rivals.
Of course, we enriched some local parts producers along the way in the name of localisation.
And look at the South Koreans: one of their marques started about the same time as us, and look where they are now.
Their cars, viewed with disdain by some snooty automobile makers then, have found a niche in the garages, driveways and parking lots of many North American and European homes with their stylish designs, advanced engineering and fuel economy.
Even one-time war-torn Vietnam will start marketing home-grown electric SUVs to the industrialised West in November. Enough said.
But I pray there’s still hope yet for our future generation as I’m captivated by this line of optimism: The past is your lesson. The present is your engine. The future is your motivation.
It may be wishful thinking on my part to hope for radical changes in the next 100 days or so that could bring forth many solutions or answers to the multitude of challenges that we now face.
Who or what could lead us out of the quagmire? Do we sink further into mediocrity?
I’m drawn to Dr Roman Krznaric, a Briton described as a public philosopher, who had expounded on the need to reinvent democracy for the long term.
He argues that when politicians fail to look beyond the next election — or even the latest tweet — they are neglecting the rights of future generations.
He depicts such flaws as short-termism and presentism.
Governments, he declares, typically prefer quick fixes, such as putting more criminals behind bars rather than dealing with the deeper social and economic causes of crime.
Nations bicker around international conference tables, focused on their near-term interests, while the planet burns and species disappear.
Like Krznaric, I’m intrigued by what the government of Wales in the United Kingdom had done in an interesting attempt to right the wrongs, although it may not be a fool-proof panacea.
Premised on “acting today for a better tomorrow”, Wales had established a Future Generations Commissioner as part of the 2015 Wellbeing for Future Generations Act.
Sophie Howe, described as one of the United Kingdom’s changemakers and top businesswomen, was appointed to the important role in 2016.
Her responsibility is to ensure that public bodies in Wales make policy decisions looking at least 30 years into the future.
The Guardian newspaper describes her as the “world’s first minister of the unborn”.
In a nutshell, the far-sighted Welsh law requires public bodies to think about the long-term impact of their decisions, to work better with people, communities and each other, and to prevent persistent problems such as poverty, health inequalities and climate change.
This legislation has been attracting interest from other countries as it offers a huge opportunity to make a long-lasting, positive change to current and future generations.
Do we dare take such a giant step for the wellbeing of future Malaysians?
- Datuk Yong Soo Heong is a former chief executive officer and editor-in-chief of Bernama. Read more about him here.
