FOREIGNERS NEED NOT APPLY

The whole country (well almost anyway) applauded when Obama was announced as the next President of the USA. Many hailed his success as a big step for the blacks. Even though he never ran his campaign along racial lines, many saw his victory as one for the black community. All post election talk, interviews and whatnots were drenched with "how has this affected the black community?"

Anyway, I digress. So we all hailed the man who was the underdog BLACK man who was up against the war veteran WHITE man. A victory indeed. In fact the PM goes on to say, as mentioned in my previous entry, that ANYBODY CAN BE PM.

So what is the point of today's ranting? The fact that we can recognise and applaud the racial barrier being broken in a far off country of the USA. But in this country we cannot seem to understand the need for such barrier to be taken down. In fact its not uncommon for many of us to subject others to our racial profiling. I myself am guilty of it. If I were to enter a toilet cubicle which is soaking wet, I would think "sure a Malay used it-la" or if I hear of a woman who makes complains about a school not teaching her child well enough "CHINESE RIGHT?", and you get my drift.

But then even I was not prepared for what met my eyes this morning in the Star paper. "Apartment residents in distress" and why so? Because, get this :-

MOST OF THE UNITES ARE OCCUPIED BY FOREIGNERS

So these residents of a block of apartments in Shah Alam have aired their dissatisfaction with the number of foreigners living in their area. According to them they spoil the lifts, they throw rubbish indiscriminately and they scare the resident's children so much that they have refused to play at the playground near the apartments.

Ok, I live in an apartment which has a miniscule number of foreigners and yet I suffer from scribblings on the lifts, and out of 10 drawings, 9 will be one which involves genitalia and will definitely have obscene words which will start with a F and end with a K. And rubbish is thrown out of the apartment balconies too. Malaysians are just not very civic minded people.We have to admit that. We push to get into LRTs and buses,we talk loudly on the mobile when we are in the cinema and we let our children pee in the sink in the loo.

As for ruining facilities in the apartment, it happens everywhere. It is tough not to walk into an apartment block and not see drawings of genitalia in the lift. And rubbish overflowing from the bins because the resident was just too lazy to walk a few more steps to the rubbish dumping area. Was it the job of a foreigner? Or just us Malaysians? It is a very Malaysian thing to be with the "boh chap" (do not care) attitude. AS long as MY home is clean, who cares about yours? So these problems persist everywhere we go.

However for the residents in Shah Alam to be IN DISTRESS that their apartments are swarmed with foreigners which are making the area of their homes a "concrete slum" is definitely uncalled for. Sure its one thing to assume the increase of say crime in an area is due to the foreigners ( ooops, here I go profiling again- but statistics have proven me right!) but its quite another to assume that the foreigners will ruin the very place that they live in. Especially when us Malaysians are guilty of doing the same things!(Yes we are also guilty of being criminals too..but that is a different story altogether.)

And the other question which begs to be answered is, what do the residents suggest? That all foreigners be shipped into an area which they can then live together in their slum and dirt and spoil whatever facilities there are available there? How about putting up signs ala America in some states in those "dark years" - "NO blacks or animals"?
So there should be a sign outside apartments now "NO BANGLADESHI, NO PAKISTANI, NO INDONESIAN,NO VIETNAMESE, NO BURMESE, NO THAI" "ONLY MALAYSIAN".

Yes, my thoughts are everywhere today, but at the end of the day, I am just annoyed to read this. Annoyed to know that we Malaysians can actually think of ourselves so superior to our neighbours that we have do not want to live with them. Such a shame indeed that we see are quick to judge others, but fail to see our own faults.