Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will") was born at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949 at North Base. It was named after Capt. Edward A. Murphy, an engineer working on Air Force Project MX981, (a project) designed to see how much sudden deceleration a person can stand in a crash. One day, after finding that a transducer was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it." The contractor's project manager kept a list of "laws" and added this one, which he called Murphy's Law.
Actually, what he did was take an old law that had been around for years in a more basic form and give it a name. To read more, please go to THIS LINK.
Did you know that one of Murphy’s many laws is “Nothing is as easy as it looks”? How true!!!
So what happened? In retrospect, many rejoiced when the Opposition swept through the 2008 elections, idealistically thinking that things would get better by the day but alas, the opposite is happening as we see nightmare after nightmare playing before our eyes, death after death, debacle after debacle , one frog hops after another ...one by-election is held after another till we all, with arms raised, scream to the heavens and cry, "Dear God, when WILL this nightmare ever end?"
If it makes us feel any better, Murphy's Law is certainly relevant in Malaysia.
We have all caught ourselves mindlessly muttering the term, “He/she deserves it/does not deserve it. It’s Murphy Law.” In our quest and dream for a better country, anything that can go wrong HAS gone wrong indeed! I am not going to depress us further by listing all the horrible sequence of events that has plagued the nation of late. All it takes is the click of the mouse to different news portals and the headlines scream at us to tell us that the battle is intensifying! We have to move beyond all these broken pieces, shattered dreams.
Indeed, Murphy was right.
Nothing is ever as easy as it looks. It is NOT easy to effect change in a society such as ours.
Increasingly across cyberspace, we can see many cynical statements about the nature of politics and the futility of having such a 2008 victory. Then, we are reminded of Murphy’s tenth law, “Mother Nature is a bitch.”
Perhaps Murphy intended to stop at his tenth law but it is his eleventh which made me think he finally figured it out:
“It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.”
Having such an electoral victory is nothing to scream about. We all should know by now. There's lots to be done in our society in terms of social service, voluntary work, political activism etc.
Today’s real problem is society. Our society, to be exact, which is fraught with so many embedded problems, complex issues and negativism.
It seems to me that everyone is frantically looking for someone else, a superman, a superhero perhaps to help them out of their problems. So we gravitate towards people looking for 'salvation' and when we don’t find such a person, we rage at the cosmos. That is exactly what is happening as we see the slow but sure disintegration of PKR - one leader after another highlights inherent problems which have been gnawing at the prestige, status and credibility of the party. The rot has to stop and they have to fortify themselves from within and without. Instead of warding off attacks from the other side, it is time they go on a different upbeat mode to rattle the other side with more exposes.
Blog reader Stanley Goh left very good suggestions in his comment to my post on "Where do we go from here?" and he said that "rather than giving it ample space to do its dirty work, keep them occupied by continuously throwing their shit back at them in parliament or via the alternative media. Keep them so busy scrambling to cover their own backsides that they have no time to try to remove their enemies pants. Attack them and continue to sow suspicion about the loyalty of their own animals so that they will always have to try to figure out if there is any enemy in their midst. As long as we keep hitting them with their misdeed, they will have less time to try their monkey tricks. Let us all do it together. We include our brothers/sisters from Sabah and Sarawak in this war.
We all have to acknowledge that no one is perfect, not even political leaders. All of us are weak in some areas in our lives and therefore attract people who have strengths in those same areas. Conversely, we have no patience for people who are weak in areas where we are strong. And some of us have a strong passion and love for our country and it hurts and pains us to see how many leaders are in self-destructive mode or a mode to destroy others!
Yes, there's lots to be done...Fools such as I dream of a great nation, my nation, your nation called Malaysia. Let's all do something small but great today. Rescue or help someone in need. Who knows, we might need someone tomorrow to rescue us from a shortcoming of our own.
Some of us may have seen signs that read “A lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”? This is another example of the world looking for someone to come to the rescue and how few of us want to be that person. But wait a minute...
Will you be a “rescuer,” or will you insist other people follow proper procedures?
The world is SUPPOSED to be a perfect creation. Everything works as it should; stars, galaxies, rivers and mountains. It’s you and I who need some work because we live in an imperfect world, one created by imperfect creatures!
Let's do our part to make our country a better place in very tangible and salient ways....and it has to begin with me, with you....
Together, we can!
Captain Obvious Dear masterwordsmith,
Murphy's Law 'Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong!' Seemed to me his line of argument implies that only those who have never been wrong about the past are likely to be correct about the future. That is a non sequitur!
But, I do agree with his tenth law 'Mother nature is a bitch.' Because being bitchy and unstable is all part of her mystique.
Cheers!