Why we write.

My friends and I who continuously write about the ills and problems of UMNO and also on society are often accused as armchair critics. Actions speak louder than words. We could have more credibility if instead of sitting down, we get up and actually do something. Like leaving UMNO and joining opposition parties. So on and so forth.

So why do we write and write articles? I was re reading Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom and found myself in agreement on the reasons why he and his friends write. Of course what he wrote are of tremendously weightier subject that ours.

He gave 2 reasons.

First. To provide subject matter for bull sessions or in Malaysian parlance- talk cock sessions. You talk over these issues over kopi tiam ( halal of course), over Starbucks Coffee, nasi alemak, the tarik sessions. In the end only you yourself can persuade yourself to believe. So you go over the subject matter over and over again, getting fresh and differing inputs, you mull them over. After a long time you turn your preferences into convictions. It is conviction that makes for a firmer decision.

Secondly as Friedman says, is to give ourselves open ended options until circumstances make change necessary. People don't understand that change is not easily taken. There is tremendous inertia on all parties to change what they perceived as comfortable arrangements already. Why re-invent the wheel they asked? We are fully ware that UMNO is like a behemoth. It talks about wanting to change but the huge body isn't moving.

What can effect change will be a crisis. A crisis produces real change. How is this related to the 'work' we do- if that can be called work at all?- continuously criticizing, exposing weaknesses an offering ideas? Because when a crisis takes place, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. So what we are doing is making ideas lying around.

So to quote Milton Friedman- that is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

I believed that such a crisis is looming. The present leadership of this country will find itself almost infirmed and incapacitated to solve the country's woes. The economy is no longer manageable given the stock and quality of leadership, social tensions escalate, political arrangements break up, so on so forth. Its impossible to imagine a change in government what more of leadership, but the politically impossible may become politically inevitable.

Then we look at the ideas and the people writing about them. we look for alternatives.