Want to believe it or not, it is your choice !

Yesterday’s (15th July 08) debate between Anwar and Shabery on reducing the petrol price made me recall a word I heard long time ago, “SCOTOMA”. Meaning extracted from dictionaries sounds like this :-

“Scotoma”
A scotoma (Greek: darkness; plural: "scotomas" or "scotomata") is an area or island of loss or impairment of visual acuity surrounded by a field of normal or relatively well-preserved vision.Every normal mammalian eye has a scotoma in its field of vision, usually termed its blind spot. The presence of this normal scotoma does not intrude into consciousness because it is very small, but it can be demonstrated to oneself by the simplest of clinical methods (such as the one in the blind spot article).

Apart from this one word, the debate also helped me to recall a phrase,

“The mind sees what it wants to see”.

Who was the winner of this debate?

I think the question should be whom do you want to be the winner?
Anwar or Shabery?

Relating this to the phrase “The mind sees what it wants to see”, made me ask myself what I wanted from this debate.

The 41%hike in petrol price really took a damaging hit on my family’s daily life. The chain effect of the price hike throughout the supply chain made me dig into my pocket much more deeper. Therefore when I was watching the debate, my mind already tuned it’s radar to look for something good that will soothe my mind and hopefully in real life later.

Automatically, the debate itself has put me on the biased side where, one guy is saying that the price increase is unavoidable and another guy is saying that the price can be reduced. At this juncture I need not to justify my “wants”. It is clear that I am looking for price reduction. My mind started to look for good things that are coming from Anwar’s mouth. On the other hand, whatever Shabery is saying seems to be excuses. Again, remember the prejudice of the mind which has already set it’s mind to be biased. We are human and when the situation is related to our daily life we tend to look for what we want.

This term can be further understood if you look at the scenario of being a jury in a court hearing. If you are one of the victims or related to the victim, you indirectly have compromised your judgment. Therefore you will be looking for statements, points, arguments, evidences, circumstances to substantiate in finding the accused guilty. But if you are totally independent, whereas you are neither related nor linked to the victim or the accused, you will weigh the court proceedings neutrally.

This is the scenario of the people watching Anwar Shabery debate yesterday. I believe all of us were looking for something good. I am very sure that we were never open to the point where the price hike is justified. We were a group of biased people (I don’t mean to offend, that is the reality).

On the word “scotoma”, which I would like to term it in simple as “blind spot”, comes on both debaters. If you really watched closely, you will see some true colours of the debaters prevailing. The blind spot is not visible to us until someone tells us that these things were missing. Anwar termed effected people as “petani”, “nelayan”, ”bumiputera Melayu”, “bumiputera Sabah Sarawak”, “segelintir Cina miskin”, “kaum India di estate”. This point should be looked deeper. What is his actual perception or principal in “serving equally” to all the people. When he defined poverty based on their livelihood activities and race, what does it reflect? Need a lot of thinking on this matter.

As for Shabbery, how can he fail to see that the price hike is not effecting all the people. All the people means: people from the ruling party too. The way he avoided this fact makes me uncomfortable. Or could it be that the people from the ruling party is not effected by the price hike……I don’t know.

Since the mind wants some good feeling, I think the debate has given a little “feel good” to many. Why many feel good? Because if Anwar forms the government, the petrol price will be down by RM0.50 and can even go further down in the future. Want to believe it or not, it is your choice !

Subra

I surfed some website and saw some interesting comments on the Anwar Shabbery debate, browse through on your interest.

http://limadang.com/2008/07/15/dato-anwar-vs-dato-shabery-debate-on-how-to-decrease-fuel-price/
http://kadazanpower.blogspot.com/2008/07/anwar-wins-debate-on-oil.html
http://thedriller.blogspot.com/2008/07/fuel-debate-anwar-vs-shabery.html


“petani” – farmers
“nelayan” – fishermen
”bumiputera Melayu” – son of the soil status local Malays
“bumiputera Sabah Sarawak” – son of the soil of Sabah Sarawak
“segelintir Cina miskin” – A small group of poor Chinese
“kaum India di estate” – Indian ethnic in estates