Meshio.com

For the first time in yours truly’s life, I am exercising my right as an eligible voter. Yup, I missed the previous 2004 GE, and I have to admit that I’ve taken my right to vote for granted.

I’ve lived in this small town for 2 decades, where my childhood has been spent hiking deep into oil palm estates and cycling from one end of the town to another. In all these years, I’ve the opportunity of witnessing the town developing or should I say not developing as well as other neighboring district.

There’s no significant progress that I can point to or I can boast about to my friends from other part of the country. Some of them have not even heard about Kluang. I’ve always answered them,”It’s a small town in the outskirt, between Batu Pahat (they’ll response with an “Ohh…”) and Johor Bahru (and they’ll response with a louder “OHHH…”).

I can’t claim to know my history very well, but Kluang was once an important town when it comes to rubber plantation. This is mainly due to the weather which is generally hot and wet throughout the year. With the price of rubber fluctuating in the past, Kluang has since become producer for many other profitable crops such as oil palm, tea and the recent discovery of “dragon fruits”.

Properties and food in general are rather overpriced, and I have no idea why. There’s not much development either in the information technology sectors, unless you count the handful computer shops and cyber cafes as part of Kluang’s IT revolution.

It’s also rumored that Kluang is a rather well-known prostitution den for Singaporeans, who makes frequent trips during the weekends to rented terrace lots where the prostitutions activities are carried out.

Many has labeled the town as a “retirement haven”, where you practically just don’t see any pace of progress. It might have been caused by the drainage of youngsters who moved out from the town to seek better opportunities; mainly across the Causeway, or all the way north to Kuala Lumpur.

It’s usually not by choice that these teenagers are moving out of town, considering that with a population of 250,000 people, there’s not ONE single institution of higher learning. Yes, no colleges, no universities (the closest University- Kolej Universiti Institut Tun Hussein Onn is located about 30 kilometres in Parit Raja).

It makes me wonder if there’s anyone in charge of developing this town? Even as it was upgraded from Majlis Daerah to Majlis Perbandaran a few years back, it doesn’t seemed to have progress very much.

I believe we seriously lack a visionary leader that will start looking into this small town that has been in slumber for so many decades. Ask any businessmen in town, and you’ll get the idea.

Come 8th of March 2008, everyone of you who’re eligible to vote, please do so with an informed state-of-mind. In the past few days, I finally figured out 2 simple facts that will let this country be run by a corrupted front:

1) Voters that are equally corrupted.

2) Voters that are misinformed.

Mind you, both are not wrong in casting the votes to the corrupted side.

Look at it this way, those of us who are voting for a better tomorrow, we cast our vote to the party that can deliver their promise in the next 5 years. This is not wrong from our perspective of changing the country for the better. Hence, voters who are corrupted will naturally vote for the corrupted party, since they need a corruptive government to thrive. And this is obviously a right thing to do, coming from their perspective. But as we look in the long run and for the future generations to come, the former strategy will seem a wiser thing to do, although not obvious.

As for voters who are misinformed, these are the unfortunate lots. They have been literally brainwashed by mainstream newspaper, national television networks and still believes what the media has been feeding them. Hence, when they cast their vote this coming 8th of March, they are essentially voting for that they “believed” is right, without the knowledge of what’s really going on. Yes, I believe this type of voters are even more dangerous than those who are not voting at all.

And also not forgetting, those who are not bothered to vote, you can’t blame this lot either. They either truly believe that they have no power to change anything or that Saturdays should be spent sipping latte in StarBucks while the fate of this nation is decided. I was in this group, mind you, and I have to admit, I was ignorant about my rights. You can change this in the next election.

Enough said, to all Malaysians, regardless of your ethnicities, cultures and backgrounds, let’s make our votes count this 8th of March!

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