Smash the pumpkins, will ya?

Attention spans were not what they used to be...current record is 2 hours max for one chapter of History. No kidding.

Right. Not trying to be "politically aware", or critical, or even questioning anything - not much, anyway - but reading about the history of America before the Revolution and the succeeding eras after that really gets you thinking. (There's something vaguely hypocritical about my sudden interest in the American government and their political system in the nineteenth century, seeing as I didn't give much thought or had much interest in the Malaysian government or political system while studying Sejarah all those years in school. But I digress...) The Constitution wasn't just a document; it was the most important document, and people fought like hell over constitutional issues. But the most interesting thing (for me), was the fact that the leaders of the time were already questioning the Constitution mere decades after it was written.

No, don't misread me, I'm not a supporter of a republican government. (I haven't thought much about this matter, not like some of my more well-read peers have done.) I just found it interesting that people could and did - on several occasions - question the statements in the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson had a disagreement over the first National Bank (I still remember! Ten points to me!) due to their different interpretations of a single phrase in a statement laying out the powers given to Congress. [See here for the Necessary and Proper Clause thingy.] Hamilton wanted a National Bank as part of his national economic plan (in the long run, he was right, and America profited very well from his reform) while Jefferson saw the Bank as an excuse to profit individual economic interests. (He was partly right here; Hamilton knew from the start that the Bank would profit the richer class who could invest and buy stock in the Bank, and thus earn dividends and returns. Smart eh.) In the end though, Washington accepted Hamilton's view, but later the issue of the constitutionality of the Bank was brought up again in the McCulloch vs Maryland case. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Bank was legal, and the state bank of Maryland had no right to tax the National Bank, for "the power to tax is the power to destroy". (History textbook has a whole bunch of interesting phrases. Fun!)

Meh, went off course. What I was trying to say was that...wait wait waaaaaaaait, I think I'm losing my nerve here. Right. What I wanted to say earlier was - if it isn't already clear to you by now - was that we can't question the articles of the Malaysian Constitution, can we...even after 50 years of independence?

Some of us do, yes, but not openly.

I think I've lost it, oh noes, what was I saying in the first place? Questioning the Articles in the Constitution...well some have, haven't they?

All right, if I don't make any sense to you by now, it's okay...just get off the page, if you want to. I'm trying to release a bit of my frustration (more displaced stress with the exams than frustration with anything, for the matter), but I haven't quite thought about these matters systematically. I did once, last year (not deeply, just occasionally), but I got so upset with the Sejarah textbook that I had to backtrack before I went back to studying. (Erm yeah, even some people in the study group got kind of tired with my senseless arguments, methinks.)

Someone might ask, maybe later, maybe now - You can question, but are going to do anything about it?

Is there anything to be done, exactly?

Just hope that any new laws don't touch anything to do with blogging, mind you. Bloggers still aren't required to register their blogs yet, but once they start making us do that, won't anything else happen as after-effects? Not that I'll be affected anyway, like Chin Lei pointed out once. It's just mindless adolescent ramblings here, but the idea of monitoring - and possibly censoring and banning - blogs which don't agree with the mass media or popular views is kind of...how do you say it...disturbing? Not really that word - it just makes me uneasy about it. ("Uneasy", like how you can speak about some friend acting suspiciously to you. It's a different context here, however.)

It's Article 10 again, isn't it?

This is seriously going nowhere. I think I'll stick with discussing Harry Potter theories and why cosine cannot be used for this stupid unsolvable sum anyway. Stick to Maths, har har. At least there's a definite answer, and if there isn't a real number, at least you could end up with infinity or an imaginary number. It's still an answer, right? No dispute necessary.

I can almost hear you laughing about this...yep, one part of my brain is telling myself this too. Developments (and in a more extreme view, revolutions) happened not because people sat back and accepted whatever was to be had then; they question instead. And oh boy they questioned. But the main important thing they did, which made all the difference, was that they acted on those questions. They did what they thought necessary to find the answers, or at best, put to rights what they could.

Erm...there's that niggling issue about what is right or wrong too, and whether any one group of people, or a single individual, had the right to act on his/her questions or beliefs. But hey, it's a human right, isn't it, to question and maybe act on it?

I know my faults, all right. One of them is my lack of motivation except in times of dire stress, e.g. exams. The other is my inability to present my thoughts and ideas coherently, backed with facts and proofs. (I get too emotional, you see.) And the third is that I tend to get argumentative at times, and argue just for the sake of arguing, not because I'm upset with the issue of the argument.

Uneasy, maybe, but not upset. I tend not to think about these things; maybe because I'm an apathetic teenager whose main priorities are keeping up with the trends and my peers (like some very wise adult views might say), or maybe I just don't dare question. Or even if I do, I'm not confident that what I'll say will make any sense in the end.

By the way - though I don't read it, honestly - Amir Muhammad's column in the NST just got removed. Guess what the dude did. He set up his own publishing company to print his new book.There's always a way!

[Edit: Had no idea how to end it. Ribbit.]