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It’s a strange strange world we live in

By C C Pung J.P

So what about baby-boomers?

I recently heard a young Tiktoker dismissing as a irrelevant generation still getting in the way.

He sounded like an American and I supposed he was dishhoreaing about the US where a person who predates the baby boomers was elected president and the BBs abound in politics and bid business.

It’s quite like good old Malaysia where guys between 60-70 occupy most seats of power, notably that villains in his 90s.

Listening to my old CD of Crosby, Nash & Stills’s  nostalgic ‘My House’ and Cliff Richard and The Shadow’s 4-disc collection  took me back in time and and kind of traced my own journey 1952.

My impressionable years in the 60’s were marked by a free magazine called ‘Plain Truth’ with stories depicting the youth and cultural evolution ‘of the west.

It was the era of the hippies phenomenon characterised anti establishment movements, drugs (grass, LSD) and free expression (remember?) …. ‘make love not war’  and lots and lots of music.

Cliff (now Sir) and Hank Marvin-led Shadows and The Beatles were among red-hot Eurupean artists among game-changing and era-defining guys like Bob Dylan, Crosby and his mates, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Credence Clear Water Revival.

I like words expressed through music. Therefore the likes of Joni Mitchell, Joan Bai Baez appealed.

BBs lived through Woodstock, a festival where all essential elements of the hippies culture – anti establishment music, drugs and free sex featured.

We also witnessed Live Aid in the 85 where Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody became an anthem for a generation and beyond.

Freddie Mercury’s and his aids illness revelation marked a BB milestone – that of the emergence of the disease of the century.

Though Live Aid was to raise fund for the African divasted by famine and hunger, it reminded the world of the hypocrisy of the west who left Africa for dead after having colonised and stripped the continent of its resources for centuries.

Sabah-born BBs like me lived through the birth of Malaysia in 1963 and was later spared the historical racial riots of May 13, 1969.

It was a bloddy event that was later thought to have been orchestrated as a prelude to the introduction of the discriminatory National Economic Policy in 1970.

Then there’s the collapse of the Soviet Union  that helped solidify the USA’s position as leader of a unipolar world,  the unification of Germany marked by the demolition of the infamous Berlin Wall, the rise of China that irked the US because it perceived it as a challenge to its global dominance.

Sabah BB survived Tun Mustapha infantile government up to 1976 which was remembered for the infamous Double Six Tragedy when an air crash at Sembulan, right within the city limit, took the lives of about a dozen people, most of them leaders of the state government which only recently took down the Mustapha government known to be favoured by the powers in the Federal government.

Many dark conspiracy theories have been spoken of in the decades since and most have to do with the right over oil and gas resources in Sabah.

Sabah’s claim over these rights are still on going today as debates rage over the Malaysian Constitution, Sabah’s continental shelf, the malaysia Agreement 1963, etc.

Sabah-born BBs likely share the sentiments that the MA63 has never been executed, neither in word or spirit.

Sabah has been ‘played around’ by Kuala Lumpur.

The consequent rise in anti-KL sentiments helped the newly found PBS to win the election in 1985, thumping the supposedly KL-backed Berjaya.

That year, KL backed a series of riots backed by defeated politicians and hordes of illegal immigrants.

These chaos prompted a snap election in 1985 when, unsurprisingly, PBS won bigger.

As the BBs subside into their twilight years, the hippies dream of a world of no wars is still a dream.

We saw the humiliation of the US in their surrender in Vietnam.

The same losers went on to destroy Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq.

They are provoking China, shit-stirring in the south China Sea which is thousands of miles away from US shores.

Europe, where industrial revolution began a couple of centuries ago and the neither continent of evil colonisers, is a collective whimp which BBs witnessed over the years as an arse-sinking partner to the US in NATO whose territories are nowhere near the US.

Overall, the beginning was good but the curse had been placed with the Birth of Malaysia.

The brits had to leave Malaysia under pressure of decolonisation.

Like the what they funked up when they exited their colonies such as in Palestine, India and elsewhere, they left nothing but pains,  devastation and confusion. 

My 70+ years also enabled me to learn that the United Nations is a waste of time.

It called for decolonisation but allowed it to happen unsupervised.

Look at how France, Belgium and other European left parts of Africa in ruins until today.

The US-west-Caucasian dominated decades in my BB years is a lot of  shit in terms of world affairs. 

But I saw colour satellite Tv, the Internet age, landlines phone to analogue handphone to all things digital, the death of fax machines and typewriters, auto transmission in cars becoming commomplace,, vinyl-casette- CD-music streaming.

How strange its been?

An obscure band sang in their ‘Mastee jack’  opening line ‘its a strange strange world we live in, Master jack’.

I don’t think it’s relevant or related to things in my mind.

Like always, some familiar tune emerge unsolicited.

Editor: The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of talantang.com

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