the TRUTH?

" With new media comes new responsibility"

 - Irwan Abdul Rahman       

There is no way for me to express this formally and i don't want to. So here goes.

Today our Media Relations class went on a little field trip. Miss Eena, our lecturer, hooked us up so we could go to The Malay Mail and meet with one of their editors - Irwan.

I have to say, he's really cool. Despite the fact that he's older than the target audience of this campaign, he has a very similar mind set. He really "gets" us. At first he talked about the basics of the newspaper and after our campaign was introduced to him, the conversations spread to other topics. One of many things that caught my attention was this : In his opinion, we shouldn't be just tolerating our differences. Instead, we should be CELEBRATING our differences. Strength in diversity.

In MY opinion, he was able to summarize what our campaign is about so simply, without even knowing it. I agree that we don't need to be told to live in unity because we already do.

THAT is what our campaign is about. It's not in support of 1Malaysia but it's not against it either. Instead of trying to promote and encourage unity we should be celebrating it instead. This is because most of us who have grown up in public, multi-racial schools have basically learnt the whole "unity" thing without being told. There may have been racial gangs runnning around school beating each other up but that was more of a "people" problem not a racist problem.

When we were younger, it hardly crossed our mind that people were different because of their race. For us we were all just people. It's only as we got older that we realised that there were situations like "You may or may not get a job because of your race" or "You may get into different colleges easier because of your race".

So in a whole, what is Malaysia-LAH again?

It's about the youth's voice! And what the youths are saying is that we ARE living in unity! We ARE united! We are all assholes!   We are fully aware of our differences and we respect each other!

FYI, the honourable Mr. Irwan Rahman may be one of the speakers of our forum. Along with a Mr. Andrew Netto. And believe me you want to hear what they have to say.

Peace out!     

~ Dorothy H. Yap