Spiritual unity, racial unity

My first assignment as a church retreat speaker ended on Monday. Theme was on "Unity in Christ".

Unity... Ironically, it's one of the trickiest things to deal with among Christians. But I'm glad how things went, message-wise. I think it was something the young people really needed to hear. I thank God for the privilege of putting me in the correct position in the right time. Glory be to Him!

With that over with, I have the luxury of time to fully immerse myself in DAP island.

Unity has been, still is, and will always be something very tricky to deal with. In the spiritual sense, and also in the racial sense.

When I first heard the election results for Penang, I was still at church. There were rumours of riots going to break out. I had a paranoid feeling as I drove home. It was a scary moment. The streets of Penang have never been so deserted!

I fell asleep in the hall sofa, in front of the TV, with a calculator in hand, watching the opposition deny the government a two-third majority inch by inch. Or rather, decimal point by decimal point.

All eyes will be on Penang now. Penang will be a model of how Rocketland will look like. A blogger will be running it! Blogger sakti!

Penangites are dangerous people. They are sensitive, unpredictable and decisive. They may love you one day. They may dump you the next. And during the silence in between, you will not know what will hit you... Until it hits you!

Don't believe? You don't have to ask Koh Tsu Khoon. Just ask the koay teow man.

When the koay teow man does something wrong, you just wait and see. It does not even have to be something wrong. Maybe it's just something that is not preferable. Half the state will boycott the stall within a week.

Oh well. I don't know if it's warranted to feel this way. But I do feel safer in Penang. I feel very, very much less likely to be robbed on the streets. I can stroll Gurney Drive on foot late at night, and feel as though nothing will or can happen to me.

Is it because of the majority-minority mentality? You feel safer when you are a majority. You feel insecure when you are a minority. Deep inside, you feel that every thief or robber won't rob their own kind. The minority is less likely to rob the majority because he is less likely to make it. You feel that the hidden racist inside every man works in your favour.

Racial polarization is bad. I'm not justifying it. But I can't deny that it happens.

The Malay taxi man in Batu Caves says he won't pick up Indian passengers when it is late at night. He says they will rob him. He's been robbed by Indian passengers a few times already. His hard-earned money for the whole day goes down the drain in exchange for his life.

The Malay robber who robbed a cyber cafe near my school lines up his victims in two rows. Malays are lined up in one row. Non-Malays are lined up in another row. All the non-Malays are emptied of their pockets.

The Chinese man who works in a private college systematically decreases scholarship allocations to bumiputeras. He turns Malay inquirers away whenever he has a chance. He says it is a righteous thing to do. He sees it as his mandate to champion the cause of the Chinese. He feels that if he doesn't do it, who will?

I've had bad personal experiences too. The mother of a tuition student who won't pay up fees. She says one thing but I know she means another. One night, the boy and his friends happened to turn up at a mamak stall where I was eating dinner. He acted as though he never knew me.

There's a hidden racist in all of us. We try to suppress it. We try to change. It is ideal to be colour blind. Sometimes, we believe that we are. But, being human, the situation is not made any easier when we are hit by bad encounters of our own. Just when the wounds are healing, you get a gash in the same spot that makes it worse.

So, how do we solve the problem? Let everyone become Christians. (Now I'm being a spiritual racist :P)

We can each do our part. We can't solve it. But we can help by not aggravating it.

Treat your neighbour well, especially those of a different colour. Hope that he will remember it. And that one day, he will do the same to others.

Give him not a reason to harbour racial bitterness. If a small boy carries his bitterness into adulthood, he may do exactly what we don't want him to do when he has the capacity to do great things. We may never know who that small boy is.

When we are hit right in the center of an old wound... Pray that we will be able to turn the other cheek. A scar in both cheeks may look like dimples.