I don’t like the kind of questions that popped in my head when I read this:
...I was more upset seeing the ugly side of a foreign-owned private hospital in Cheras, which doesn’t even wink staring at a life dying at its doorstep.
(Read the post from Jeff’s blog)
Get Angry, Moralize.
The predictable response to this is readily obvious—anger, shock, disgust. It is the worst thing to happen to one’s child, and the feelings of helplessness and anger and sorrow that the parents of the victim and our feelings are real. Let us not deny that.
I’m going to talk about my own personal reaction to this post.
First Impressions
The first thing that popped into my head when I read the news was this—“How many other people have gone through something like this?”
What drew my eye to this whole post were these parts:
Two nights ago, as I was following TV3’s news coverage on Noh Omar, I stumped onto visuals of DPM Najib’s wife, who was sobbing uncontrollably.
[...]
I was told Khairul’s family was known to Rosmah Mansor, wife of Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak, as Khairul and her daughter were classmates at the international school in Damansara.
The Stain
Understand this. I am not belittling the death of that boy. What happened to him was horrible, unexcusable, and a terrible stain for Malaysians everywhere.
But the thing is, if the classmate of the daughter of officially the second-most powerful man in Malaysia can die from simple, criminal neglect, because that’s what it is, how many other people have gone through this, have died because of this?
Jolted Awake
It should not take the death of the child of someone influential to jolt us out of our fucking sleep. It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t take the death of someone known to influential people to get our ministers to say that they’ll revoke the fucking license of pricks who put profit before ethics.
It should take a crowd of angry people several decades ago to say, “Fuck this. We don’t want to be treated like bags of money with a straw in it.” The market should have caught this error and fixed it.
But it didn’t, so here we are. The system failed. Quelle surprise?
Ugly rumors, uglier truth?
I’ve heard tales of bodies of the recently-deceased held by private hospitals who refused to let the body be treated with dignity and respect, the way human beings are supposed to be treated. Hell, there were dying people, fellow Malaysians, who were, apparently, refused treatment because they didn’t have time to pony up the goods.
How many times has this happened? How many times were the people involved in it ignored, threatened or cajoled to shutting the fuck up and letting this pseudo-hypercapitalistic piece of shit we call the status quo continue? Hundreds of times? Dozens? A few? Once?
Once is too much.
It is a tragedy. It is terrible. Here’s something to chew on, though: the story wouldn’t have gotten such big coverage if the boy’s family was poor or not well-connected. Ministers would have said nothing if the boy was some poor nobody from Klang. Nothing would have happened if this was some old guy who died of a stroke because groups of tight-fisted cunts who have the fucking gall to call themselves hospitals refused treatment.
So. Where does that leave us?
Edited: I’ve realized that some of you might have misconstrued a couple of my statements as racist and unnecessary. Frankly, since I didn’t intend it to be that way, I have removed a significant portion of what looked like racist remarks. Remind me if you see any more, why don’t you?
