Do people write out of frustration, or reasoned need? Fairplayer in his letter Bumi-bashing has to stop (June 15) might be accurate in observing that emotions affect our thinking, but that does not render the reason residing in those expressed views, meaningless. He only wants to say about things that affect him; yes, affect him at an emotive level.

Does a discussion on bumiputra preferential treatment create an environment of discomfort for all Malaysians, inside or outside the debate? Of course it does, sometimes it appears to be the only thing that creates an environment of discomfort in modern Malaysian political debates.

The proponents of the status quo point to the Malaysian Constitution, or at least to the part of it, when liberally interpreted give us the present policies. And opponents to the moral depravity within the promoted policies and the evil it creates. The people that promote it tend to be the people that gain from it, and the people condemning it, from the communities that lose out.

I think that is pretty straightforward. The prickly part is when there are those who think that the issue is a non-debate. How can an issue affecting every level of Malaysian life and so widespread not worthy of public debate?

The argument that the debate had been settled before Merdeka is wrong. If people want to talk about the details and validity of policies constructed or at least designed almost two generations ago (whose voters then constitute less than five percent of the Malaysian population today), then they should have the right to talk about it, progressively and constructively.

Are those opposed to a debate today fair? No. They hope to keep ideas of a different time and context alive through the adoption of means to sustain non-reproach. Here is the reasoning: "Those things were decided a long time ago, they are done deals. If your grandfather had no problem in accepting it, why do you? Talking about it will lead us nowhere, just to more recriminations and misgivings. Is it worth destroying the stability we have over something that never can be solved because it is so sensitive?"

I do get lost in the whirlwind or the gusto of gas, when someone talks like that. That the Malaysian race relations equation is so tangled that it would outshine the Gordian Knot that Alexander the Great confronted centuries ago. I don't buy that. I think we can resolve it, if we are willing to talk about it.

Question: If people here and today do not discuss about the issues that affect them here and today, who then discusses on our behalf? And if these people are discussing on our behalf because we are incapable of doing it ourselves, then, are they not decapitating our basic enfranchisement?

I think in the past few decades, rationale and progressive thinking has been hindered by a nebulous sense of pragmatism, of which is assumed successful because the very people who promote it echo repeatedly its unending beauty.

Malaysians must have the right to talk about issues and complexities that affect them. The conditions that supposedly postponed that debate before have eroded. The country has an educated population, and thus the time arrived for us to face our demons.

I can almost see someone brandishing in their hands an Elections Commission's guidebook, telling me that there are elections in Malaysia and if people have had felt like me, they would have made their choice in the polling booth.

It is not simple as that, and not fair to say the existence of elections is good enough, because one day, those who in power now may be in opposition, and if those in power then dished this treatment in return, they too would be termed an oppressive government.

There is a lack of decorum in the way democracy is practised in Malaysia, and showing the lack of dissent is not proof of acceptance, it is proof of absolute and tyrannical grip of its people.

I've heard people making reference to history and a constitution, can someone offer a valid and rational explanation why the sort of widespread preferential treatment is justified. Not just a lame explanation that the weak need help, because of course the weak need help, but the weak are not confined to any racial or geographic group.

I think the bells are tolling and I believe they are saying that the times are a changing.