To Act or To Omit

Once Uncle Ben told Peter Parker that "Power comes with Responsibility".
Not many of us have the ability and the luck to become spider man, but certainly we can have powers through many ways, albeit not the unnatural superpower.

In May 2015, Malaysia was approached by many "pendatang" (what we call immigrant from other country, usually the under-developed one) from Myanmar, and most of these pendatangs are the Rohingyas which has been facing the political persecution for decades in their country due to politic and religion.

The ships which carried all this pendatangs were broken, and they run out of supply such as food, clean water, medicine and so on. Despite this emergency situation, none of the countries near the Andaman Sea (to be specific, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia) provides assistance to these poor refugees.

This scene reminds me of a news that in Malaysia, for which state I am not sure, that stray dogs were moved to one of the isolated islands nearby that state. And that's it.
Few weeks later, it was found that most of the dogs were in poor health condition, and it was seen that they were eating each other.

While on social media, it is hard to see that lots of Malaysians have praised our Government that it has done a great job, despite that it has signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which one of the provisions state that we have the responsibility to take care refugees.

I've been following this news for few week and one day, as I was reading one of the column that the particular journalist has compared this situation with a real incident that happened in Rwanda, which was later on screened as "Hotel Rwanda".

I've just finished the movie. And I am affirmed that I totally agree with the column.

The people of Malaysia has been urging our government to bring reforms in human rights, yet on the other hand, we refuse to help those who are in grave condition where we have undertaken to help.
The reasons of the refusal are mostly based on that we already have too many illegal immigrants in our country which make Malaysia less safe.
If the government decided to help them then this will be the last straw breaks the camel's back.

To certain extent, I understand this worry as our public safety has been deteriorating for the past decades.
However, I refuse to believe that most of the Malaysians are hard hearted to leave this innocent peoples die, where we could certainly provide assistance to prevent further tragedy happened.

In difficult times, we have to make a choice.
It is up to us to make that choice, whether to act or omit.

History always shows the best lesson, just that we didn't learn.
We've never though that one fine day, we were the one who is on that broken ship.
It will be too late for us to act at that moment.