Sunday, March 09, 2008

D-A-wat? P-K-wat? P-A-wat?

i have a confession to make.

to those who know me, it may come across as a shock and some of you may even shake your heads in disbelief. so, here goes...

I VOTED!!

okay. you can close your mouths now. you can blink too.

everybody knows how utterly clueless i am when it comes to politics. and i have noticed that i am not the only one. many people in my generation haven't got a clue about what's going on behind the curtains in the world of politics.

and because of this, a majority of us don't bother voting because we haven't got a clue who we should be handing our futures to. it's like choosing between giving ourselves over to slavery or prostitution. which, in fact, isn't really all so different from giving ourselves over to politicians, innit?

i admit, i wouldn't have taken the initiative to register myself and certainly would have adopted the common thought of "why bother? nothing's going to change anyway," if it hadn't been for an accidental discovery.

i didn't register myself. but i was registered.

the word "phantom voter" echoes through the air.

so instead of letting them use me, i decided to use the opportunity and turn the knife around.

over the last couple of weeks, i realised how bleak the future looked for our generation. less than one third of the people i know actually said they were voting.

imagine. less than one third. i've been told that the statistics are something along the lines of:

population : 27 million
registered voters : 11 million
submitted votes : 8 million

don't quote me on that. but it's an indication of how much we could change the system if everyone DID put their one measly vote in.

so that's what i did. and i'm proud of it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

People under 21 can't vote, that's about 40% of the population of 24.8m. Malaysian voter turnout may not be spectacular, we are just ok, but definitely not as shitty as the USA.

If less than 1/3rd of people you know are voting, that's alot lesser than the national average. Maybe you ought to hang out around more politically aware people.

Alysia S. said...

strangely enough, at least half of the non-voters i know are actually fairly politically aware. i was quite surprised myself that they were not voting.

i guess it's not enough for our turnout to be just 'ok' if we are hoping for any real changes.