Late last night I saw many tweets about #CDM25. Like many things that viral, I didn’t immediately search what it was about. But after seeing enough people tweet about it I decided to pay attention.
It all came to this one video of a woman throwing her fit of anger at an old uncle while swinging her steering lock around like a baseball bat.
Watching the video brought me through a roller coaster of emotions. I felt sad and angry while watching the poor uncle take the verbal battering. Then I chuckled at the funny memes that people have come up with in this short span of time.
And by the end of it all as I reflected on it, I felt sad. Sad that an incident like that happened at all.
As I thought deeper into it I realized that there were some scary things about this incident that really highlight the world that we live in today. Here’s a list of them.
1) How nobody who witnessed it offered to help the uncle or even pacify the situation
You can tell from the video that there were many witnesses there but none of them did anything to really stop it. Nobody did anything when she cursed at him and nobody did anything when she brought out her steering lock to use as a weapon of sorts. I wondered how far this had to escalate before anyone intervened. Would she have to hit him with the steering rod? Or destroy his car? Or hurt someone?
We often feel safe in public. That bad things won’t happen to us because people around us will protect us. Situations like this remind us that the people around us won’t necessarily help us.
2) In her fit of anger she said “Dia Cina, saya tahu dia Sengaja” (He’s Chinese I know he did it on purpose)
While our country hard on becoming a country that sees Malaysians as Malaysians and not Malaysians as Malays, Chinese and Indians… this one thing reminds us that we’re still far away from the 1Malaysia ideal that we as a country are working towards.
On the bright side, we’ve had Malays speak up against the behaviour of the woman.
Here’s the thing though. The main issue shouldn’t be about race. It’s about a Malaysian woman being very rude towards an older Malaysian man. It goes against our values because one such value (regardless of the race we are) is to have respect for our elders. She showed no such respect.
3) How one wrong thing you do can grab the attention of everyone
In the unconnected pre-social media world incidents like this happened all the time but people got away with it. They got away really because there was often no consequence. Today when everyone has a camera and access to social media platforms that can reach millions of people, we all have to think twice about what we do before we do it. Because for all you know, millions of people could be watching it.
4) How everything people need to know about us is on the internet
As quick as this video went viral, people wanted to identify who this woman was and they did more than just identify. They found out her full name, what she did for a living and even where she lived.
All this information wasn’t pulled from some secret CIA database. It was pulled from the internet. Today many of us put enough about us on the internet that we leave a huge internet footprint for anyone who wants to know about us to follow. If they look hard enough they can even know where we like to eat, where we go to work, who our friends are… and more.
Citizens of the world are more exposed today than we have ever been in the history of mankind.
5) How Quick We Are To Judge
That’s what we all did when we watched this video. We judged the woman and called her all sorts of names for her bad behaviour. Most of us didn’t bother to wonder what was her side of the story. Why was she angry? Was she having a really bad day? Was she stressed that she wouldn’t be able to pay for repairs? What was it?
Yes chances are whatever her excuse was it still doesn’t justify her behaviour. But perhaps if we knew more it would add another dimension of the story for us to understand her as a character. Instead what we naturally do is judge her for being a bad person and call her names.
6) How People Remember Only The Bad Things
This is related somewhat to my previous entry that people somehow remember only the bad things. The sad thing is that we will always remember Kiki Kamarudin as the angry woman who bullied an old uncle. She won’t be known for any of the good she has done in her life… whether she has helped people less fortunate than her in the past or whether she has made sacrifices for the benefit of other people. We don’t see any of that. We just now see her as a bad person. Nothing more.
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My parting thought with this is of forgiveness. Many of us have once lost our tempers and done things to hurt people even close to us… things that we often regret. I know I have done so.
Being in that emotional angry state is a state of weakness. It’s when you’re not yourself (like Hulk in a way) and you sometimes become this ugly person you don’t want to know.
I would like to believe that Kiki was just in this angry emotional state and did something she probably regrets now. The only difference with her and us is that her situation went viral and was broadcasted for all to see whereas ours never left the rooms they happened in. So forgive Kiki.
I commend the uncle for handling the situation as well as he did. I have that and more to learn from him.
As for us we can only draw from the lessons we learned from incidents like this. So the next time we want to throw a fit of anger in public, try to think about CDM25.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space