Live Forums are So Much Fun!

I have just joined my first online forum and it is so much fun! I get this wonderful feeling where everyone is so helpful and forthcoming with their bits of information. There is such a sentiment of belonging that it makes you want to go out, actually do the research and then feed information back into the forum just so you can be a useful member of the ‘community’.

The question this leads me to is why can’t we engender that same kind of loving feeling in the mass community? It isn’t impossible, it’s obvious it can be done and is being done, so what is it that’s lacking. The most obvious ingredient that’s missing in a mass community is that unifying factor of ‘us against the world’ or ‘1 for all and all for 1’, ‘we are in the same boat, so if I help you, you can help me too’…..the smaller the group, the easier to fan the flames and keep them burning bright because there is usually a stronger feeling of loyalty and less chances for escape from responsibility.

The only thing is that citizens of the world do not see themselves as belonging to the same club, hence no unifying factor. Some out there think, well, if others are already lobbying to reduce reckless use of exhaustible fuel sources, I’m not needed, or worst still, the hands-off ‘too many cooks spoil the soup’ anyway argument.

Not sure why I am lamenting the fate of the world when I would like to see the citizens of Malaysia get together a bit more – no more spitting publicly, no more rolling down your car window and dumping used tissue, no more non-flushing of public toilets and stealing anything removable that’s in a public place! How does the government educate its people? How can it be done? Civic Consciousness is a phrase that is overused in Moral Education but rarely practised, of course neither is Common Sense usually. I refuse to believe that there are people out there who do not flush their toilets at home….so why do you change your standards, practices when you are out in the public eye? If anything, I thought one would behave better!

It is not my job to change the world, I do not assume I can change the world (granted, I am not THAT proactive as well) but I would like to make an impact on the people surrounding me. I would like to make them see that littering is bad (you know who you are) and jumping queues is wrong and shoplifting is criminal! If I can change the few people close to me and they can change the few people close to them, my work is done. Break it down into small manageable pieces, then you’ll see the work to ‘Change The World’ is so impossible after all!

I like to say to myself, whenever the urge to take the easy (but wrong) path is: ‘If you do this now and you know it is wrong, it WILL come back and bite you in the butt some way or another, some day or another’. And that keeps me on the straight and narrow!