Happy 53rd Merdeka, but are we a united nation?

Its the 31st of August 2010, 53 years ago our country was liberated from the British and put under self-governance. Fast forward to today, has our nation, a nation that prides itself as a melting pot of many many cultures and traditions, achieved unity among the races yet?

    My view? Not yet. Racial prejudice remains alive in our country. Racial prejudice, I think will never ever vanish in the world. The main thing we need to focus on is to lessen racial prejudice not to abolish it because it can never be done. Take the US as an example, they got their 1st African American president last year in the name of Barack Obama. Yes, racism is better now there than before, but it is still there. What we need in this country is equality. It is always said that all of us have the same privileges, but all of us know that it is not true. We are still a racially polarized nation. Our former PM, Dr Mahathir mentioned recently that the Chinese must not be given strong political positions because the M'sian Chinese are too dominant in the country's economy (here). Not long ago, some M'sian Indians formed a protest group because they felt they were not given good privileges. When will this end? Chinese, Malay, Indian, Kadazan...when will M'sians start calling themselves "Malaysians"? The bumiputras are still given better privileges and are still being treated with bias. I'm truly sorry to all my bumi friends, but this is true. To really make the country united, we have to give everyone equal priviledges. Being biased towards a group of people will spoil them, even Dr Mahathir himself claimed that he failed to make the Malays realise that they have to wake up and not depend on the government anymore.

    However, compared to years before. I have started to see changes. Go to the mamak stalls and you can see people of different races cheering for their favourite football team or fellow M'sians together. We can also see more and more interracial relationships nowadays. Things have progressed, and how I hope they will progress further. As the infamous M'sian rapper, Namewee, from Muar, Johor sang "Fuck Racism"(video), we should not view others as Chinese, Malay, Indian etc. but rather as Malaysians. We should not be like the stupid principle, Siti Aishah or whatever she's called. One day in the future I hope to see in my lifetime, maybe a Chinese or Indian PM and citizens that put their trust in a leader of a different race. This has happened in many countries and hopefully M'sia will be one of them.

Sources: The Star