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National unity is a much-tossed-about subject nowadays. We use every occasion and opportunity to emphasise the importance of different communities staying together, urging them to practise ‘give and take’ and be moderate and reasonable in their demands. Yet incendiary remarks and extreme demands have never been more prevalent than in recent years. In fact, they are getting bolder by the day.

This brings me to the baloney I observe each day on how our leaders are trying to promote ‘national unity’ - a fake unity that is transient and skin deep.

When Malaysians cheered our Olympians, we claimed national pride and unity. When we made videos/movies depicting different races living in harmony, we confused the videos with reality. When we celebrated Merdeka and Malaysia Day, we forgot it was only a state-sponsored event, not our daily life.

The baloney can go further. When a person married a spouse or adopted a child of a different race, he was hailed as a true-blue Malaysian. When a leader made a thoughtless remark on the demise of someone, we thought it was cute. When a leader helped to secure the release of two Malaysians detained in a foreign country, he was instantly labelled as ‘non-racist’, despite his less than illustrious record.

Indeed I must say our national unity has become so fragile and helpless that trivia is now used as the substitute.

We spent millions on fake efforts, leaving the real problems of disunity, marginalisation and deprivation to fester among us.

I think the greatest disunity factor is to disenfranchise people, making them have ‘no say’ in almost everything in our national life.

National unity needs real and sincere efforts. We could parade our Merdeka celebration every month, our sportsmen and women could win even more medals, our leaders could marry more spouses from different races, our goverment-linked companies (GLCs) could make even more ‘feel-good’ videos and our evergreen Adenan Satem could sing ‘The Young Ones’ a hundred times a month, but all these efforts are not going to make an iota of difference when fundamental problems of unity are not resolved.

When there are sincere efforts on unity, the ripple effects on the people would be spontaneous. People will live in harmony and show courtesy to each other without urging or coercion. Like imitation goods, fake and pretentious efforts are repulsive.

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