This is probably the time of the year when Malaysians feel happiest, with the long festive season extending from Christmas to the New Year’s Eve celebration, and culminating in Chinese New Year which falls on Feb 14, 2010.

There will be much feasting and revelry, for this period marks the change of the seasons - the end of one year and the beginning of a new one. No matter what bad things have happened in the past year, a new year always heralds in fresh opportunities for renewal and rebirth.

Many news organisations will be asking their readers to nominate the 10 most significant stories in the past year of 2009.

On the other hand, Newsweek magazine has pointed out that Jan 1, 2010 marks the end of the first decade of the new 21st millennium, and has invited readers to vote for the greatest events of the last decade. For that, my vote is for the 9/11 terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda in 2001.

As for the Malaysian domestic scene, the most significant event in the past decade must be the shocking general election on March 8, 2008. Malaysian politics will never be the same after that date.

But I cannot find the kind of enthusiasm with which the youths of Klang Valley celebrate their New Year’s Eve, often in an orgy of sounds and colours at a street party on Jalan Bukit Bintang.

I prefer to sit at home to enjoy the peace and quiet that come to an old man in his sunset year on the hill top of Cheras, nursing my glass of single malt whisky, and contemplating how I am one step closer to my grave. In my ageing years, I have finally succeeded in learning to enjoy my own company.

Most Asians would think that talking about death and dying – especially on the eve of a new year – is morbid. After all, most Asian cultures, perhaps with the exception of Buddhism, consider life as good and death as bad. But having lived through many decades of critical thinking, I know matters of life and death are never so clear cut.

Talking about grave, I have left words for my body to be cremated. It is cheap and clean, and I believe dead men should not deprive living men of valuable land. The world is too crowded as it is.

But I would like to tell my small but faithful band of readers not to be overtly worried. The last time I had a medical check-up, my doctor told me I am not likely to kick the bucket anytime soon.

My New Year’s resolution

I know I will not be able to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the kind of silly abandon as the sea of youths in Bukit Bintang. Where ignorance is bliss, it is indeed folly to be wise.

I will be thinking about the bloody wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Palestine, Somalia, and any number of countries where daily countless number of innocent men, women and children die cruel and unnecessary deaths from conflicts and diseases.

I look askance at the television images of those Men of God proclaiming war and death in the name of their God, as if they have just received an email from their God. I watch how those impressionable young men and women declaring their intent to strap themselves with explosive and to detonate it to kill innocent civilians, again in the name of God.

Can a God as great as they claim be so unreasonable?

Fortunately in Malaysia, we are spared the spectre of such religious fanatics, even though we have our own locally-brewed sectarians, who would argue by what name we are allowed to call our God.

I am not a member of any organised religion, but that does not mean I am not religious. I reserve my final right to choose a religion on my deathbed as a sort of insurance, just in case there is an afterlife. One never knows for certain about this sort of things.

Looking back the past year, the past decade, and the past century, you have to admit the world is a pretty ugly and hopeless place. Even at the end of this year and this decade, the world cannot come to a binding global agreement in Copenhagen to save our earth from eventual and inevitable destruction.

I ask myself this question: what are the greatest evils that stalk the heart and soul of mankind?

I have to answer that the greatest evils on earth are greed, selfishness and ignorance that lurk in the nadir of being of our collective existence.

Inevitably, there will be those readers who will condemn me as “pessimistic”. “Pessimism” or “optimism” are but subjective states of the mind of the individual, and may not change the outcome of the objective world. Besides, labelling does not constitute an argument.

In Malaysia, we witness signs of greed, selfishness and ignorance aplenty in the public domain. We witness how men and women in political parties jostle shamelessly for positions of power without any pretense to any sense of honour. We see how public funds are siphoned off to make powerful individuals fabulously rich overnight.

Daily, we read disinformation paraded as truth in the mainstream media. We observe how the old institutionalised racism spewing its corrosive rhetoric of hatred. We watch silently how the institutions of state continued to be manipulated to keep the ruling regime in power. We watch with cold eyes how the true will of the people is usurped on a daily basis.

This then is my New Year’s resolution.

Our work is not done yet. We have to renew our resolve to continue this resistence movement, this work of building a rainbow coalition in offering an alternative platform for public opinion, where we shall preserve and respect our diversity, while seeking to narrate a new story based on our common destiny.

It should be a narrative based on freedom - freedom from poverty and from want, freedom from all forms of oppression, freedom from religious and racial discrimination, freedom from economic exploitation, and freedom to help build a great multiracial, just, and prosperous Malaysia.

Happy New Year!

SIM KWANG YANG can be reached at kenyalang578@hotmail.com.