I was an eight-year-old Primary Two pupil in a village school in Bario, Sarawak when Lyndon B Johnson became the first US President to visit Malaysia in 1966. Not that I knew about it back then, but it was something I learnt about many years later. There is a relational context of this historical event to the essence of this article.
Two years earlier, I walked alone to another school in Pa Main village one morning to ask the teacher that I be enrolled in his school, but I was turned down. The teacher said I was too young to attend school and told me to come back the following year. With my hope dashed, I cried all the way home. At such a young age somehow I felt that education was important for me. The inkling of hope and hunger for an education was seeded in me early through the stories told by my father, who though uneducated, knew the value of education and kept encouraging me to attend school when the time came up for me to do so. I was too eager and just couldn’t wait to get to school.
Hence, the turning up alone at the village school one year too early!
Born in Pa Main village in 1958, when Sarawak was still a Crown Colony of Britain, I was not born a Malaysian but became one by operation of law in 1963 when Malaysia came into existence with the coming together of the Federation of Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore to form the Federation of Malaysia. And living deep in the rainforests in the centre of Borneo, I have never heard of President Johnson, let alone of his visit. Unknown to me then, the Vietnam War was already well on its way, having started on November 1, 1955. It was probably, the reason the US President visited Malaysia and the region in 1966.
As a small boy, I did however hear about the USA from my father. He said that I should study hard and if I was clever enough I could one day go to a university in “Negeri Merikan”, which is the USA in Kelabit. This, he said, was to follow in the footsteps of Lian Ulang, the first Kelabit to study in America. Lian Ulang is also known as Henry Lian Aran, the name for which he is better known. Lian was the pathfinder and trend setter for every Kelabit kid back then. He was the beacon of hope for every Kelabit kid. He was our Neil Armstrong, the first man to land on the moon, even though in Kelabit mythology the first man to go to the moon was another Lian. He was Lian Tadun Sinah Ngedtang, the Kelabit superhero, more powerful than Superman. He could jump to the moon as and when he wished. He did not need to be blasted there in a rocket like Neil Armstrong.
Fast forward to 2014, another US President made the second visit to Malaysia. This time, I was around to witness the historical event as I was no longer in the heart of the rainforests in Borneo but working and commuting between the nation’s capital Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.
Barack Obama’s visit was the first visit by a President of the United States to Malaysia since that 1966 visit by Lyndon Johnson. Barack Hussein Obama II was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He grew up in Java, Indonesia, which I thought is close enough to Borneo.
More significantly, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States and a magnificent orator. Being the first African- American President, it made it possible to imagine that one can be a leader of the greatest nation on earth irrespective of one’s background, ethnicity and skin colour. For many he was hope personified. He was definitely one of the greatest US presidential orators in modern history, with a gift for public speaking.
Obama’s visit to Malaysia however coincided with the shocking disappearance of a Malaysian Airline commercial airliner carrying 239 people in the previous month. That incident put Malaysia in the international spotlight. When Obama visited it was reported that the US would assist in the search for the airline, raising hope that the mystery of the plane’s disappearance would be speedily resolved. Alas, even with the help of the most technologically advanced and powerful nation on Earth that hope was never fulfilled, even to this day.
Apparently, in July 2004, four years before his presidency, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. He appealed to all Americans. It is said that one phrase in particular anchored itself in the listeners’ minds – a reminder that despite all the discord and struggle to be found in her history as a nation, the Americans have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Obama called “the audacity of hope”.
In his book “The Audacity of Hope” Obama said this on hope: “Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end that is God’s greatest gift to us …. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.”
Indeed, hope is a powerful thought to have and something that we must possess. Whenever we contemplate on the subject of hope, or its absence, we can’t avoid thinking about the future. Hope and the future are so closely interlinked in a prospective sort of way. It’s difficult to talk about hope and projecting it back to the past. Unless, we mean to illustrate how the power of hope had inspired some positive actions or developments in the past or the lack of it as a consequence of certain events in the past. We need hope for the future; that is not in doubt.
But coming to the now and with an eye to what has happened in the past, can we ask the question as to who is or was responsible for the general conditions of the world today or the society that we are living in today? The answer is pretty obvious – not the youth of today. They did not create the world they are living in now. Someone else did.
Let me be blunt – the baby boomers and those generations before are primarily responsible for the state of the world today. It is the legacy that they are leaving behind, for better or for worse. And the people who will bear the brunt of that legacy will be those who fall into the category of the world’s youth demographic. What will be their world like? Will it be a worse version of our world today or a better one? Let me not attempt a short answer, for the answer is pretty obvious.
Whatever the prognosis, I believe we would not go wrong, and will make amends if we were to invest in our youth. The youth are our future. No, let me put it differently – they are the future. By investing in our youth, we will make hope possible. To borrow Obama’s words, we will give them that sparkle of “the audacity of hope”. To help them hang on to hope in the face of all difficulties we are experiencing and the uncertainties that envelope our lives, clouding our future.
I did a quick check on our national statistics, and this is what I found – Malaysia’s youth make up a staggering 45 per cent of the total population in 2021. To plant hope and to invest in them is the responsibility of the current generation, those in power and in position of authority, and those who have the means and influence to make a positive difference.
In these times of trials and tribulations where a pandemic which has been raging worldwide has yet to abate, where the drums of wars have rolled and armed conflicts and fighting are sprouting like uncontrollable bush fires in many parts of the world, where the climate change phenomenon is now a confirmed reality — and as a result of all of which the world is struggling to cope with an unprecedented an existential challenge, where does hope factor? It’s very difficult to install a sense of hope and positiveness in the current state of the world. The legacy that is unfolding is almost bereft of hope.
The light of hope can still be lit if we focus on our young and the youth. We need to invest in them by instilling an abiding faith in God. A person of faith will have hope, and the process of faith building will engender hope, giving strength and the power to do something about the present as well as for the future. The answers to the challenges of the present are in the heart where hope resides. We need to give our young and the youth the ability to distinguish right from wrong, what it means to be really human, to know the truth from all the lies and deliberate misinformation and propaganda that is inundating the world like a worldwide flood as in Prophet Noah’s days. The speed and acceleration of misinformation is unprecedented and made more pervasive by the power and reach of the online and social media.
How do we instil hope in a world which is torn by war, destroyed by hate, decimated by despair, and devastated by distrust and on the brink of destruction, and where famine ravages millions of inhabitants in some parts, while feasting and gluttony are enjoyed by inhabitants in another parts.
It is as if the world is a ticking time bomb, with apartheid and racism in one hemisphere and apathy in the other. Scientists tell us there are enough nuclear warheads to wipe out all forms of life on earth except cockroaches. So how do we motivate the youth to go forward in hope; to prevent this world from being a ‘Planet of the Cockroaches’? That is the paradox of our times.
