Be a normal country, please

(My SinChew) – Enough! Everything should come to a close with the High Court verdict. The government should stop making appeals on the verdict, and for goodness sake, no more “Sodomy 3” in the future, please!

A friend of mine has spent years working in China and is hardly interested in what happens in Malaysia.

On his recent vacation in Malaysia, he blurted out in shock after reading the verdict of Anwar’s sodomy trial on the newspaper: “What! The case has been going on for more than a decade and now that they deliver a verdict?”

Of course not!

My friend has been away for years and has not been able to get updates from the country in China. The Chinese authorities have blocked news portals from Malaysia, including Sinchew-i, and all that he knew of Anwar’s case, as a consequence, was what took place over ten years ago.

He was hardly aware of “Sodomy Part II.”

Indeed, “Sodomy 1” took place in 1998, and “Sodomy 2,” as recent as 2008. Although the people involved have changed, the plots somewhat differing, some of the attributes have not changed:The protagonist is still Anwar Ibrahim, and the content still sodomy.

Other than my friend who has been staying away from this country for so many years, I believe many Malaysians still could not quite fathom out which is which.

Let’s assume there is a lapse of three or four years between “Sodomy 1” and “Sodomy 2” and you have been drifting into a deep comatic sleep all these years and suddenly waking up to the real world and getting shocked by what you’re reading. Why on earth is this sodomy thing still going on all these years?

Wait a minute! Why is that tanned, well-built, supposedly sodomised driver all of a sudden transformed into a fair-skinned, well cultured pretty boy? He couldn’t have gone on a drastic weight management course coupled with a comprehensive plastic surgery having been shot to stardom overnight, could he?

Such a déjà vu illusionary confusion could easily obliterate the demarcation between what is real and what is not.

In psychology, déjà vu is a mental state in which the subject feels familiar with the environment, as if a dream-like memory comes alive in the realistic world.

To help this friend of mine get over with this déjà vu state of mind, I gave him a crash course on contemporary Malaysian politics, highlighting to him that while both were still sodomy cases, they occurred ten years apart and involved two different young men: a stout-bodied Azizan Abu Bakar and a fair-skinned Mohd Saiful Bukhari.

My friend suddenly came to the realisation and said after a brief moment of contemplation, “During the past ten years that I’ve spent in China, I’ve seen new skyscrapers springing up on a daily basis, new freeways opening every month, and new subway and high speed rail services on the go every year. New changes are coming on stream every minute and every second literally.

“Why have things remained much the same in Malaysia over the past ten years? It was sodomy ten years ago, and sodomy again today!”

I was speechless.

Enough! Everything should come to a close with the High Court verdict. The government should stop making appeals on the verdict, and for goodness sake, no more “Sodomy 3” in the future, please!

Malaysia is not a Sodomy state. All that we want is a normal country.

Let’s put behind all the nonsense and get back on our feet again!