COMMENT | What I am going to say may surprise you. Or it may be of little concern to you because it is too far away. Or it may be unimportant to you, for I may appear an alarmist for saying it.

I worry my generation is the generation that knows how to defeat monsters, but doesn’t know how monsters are made.

You must know this: My generation was born in a time of possibilities. People aged between 18 and 35 were born from 1988 to 2000. That means when this generation came of age, the only elections that they knew of were the three political tsunamis of 2008, 2013, and 2018.

The 2008 general election denied the BN-Umno government a two-thirds majority for the first time in history; 2013 denied BN-Umno the popular vote for the first time in history; 2018 eventually brought down the 60-year-old government.

Every vote cast by my generation has created history.

But these events are only known as historic if we have an appreciation of how far we’ve come.

If you are from my generation, you wouldn’t appreciate how difficult it is to change the government. In fact, most people my age voted for the first time in 2018 - and we brought down a corrupt regime on our first try.

A generation of possibilities

On the one hand, this generation of hope and possibility is of course a good thing. We are not burdened with a fear of changing the government, like the previous generations. My generation takes courage from democracy because change has always been within our radar of possibilities.

A recent study by think tank Iman Research is also reassuring. It found that young people are ready to switch political allegiance if the Pakatan Harapan government isn’t up to par.

This is very good on paper, but the reality I see seems more uninviting...