COMMENT | It’s natural to be defensive when people attack you. That doesn’t mean it’s the best strategy.

Being defensive means you are playing out a script that your enemies have written out for you.

And if you’re not careful, calling the cops whenever people say something you don’t like is going to look a bit like calling your mum every time someone tries to bully you in the playground.

In 2018, then-prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad had a window of opportunity to clearly define what Malaysia’s first non-BN government was going to be all about and create a new narrative for Malaysia.

He refused to do so. Without a new narrative, and a clear definition of what ‘New Malaysia’ meant, we fell back all too quickly on the Old Malaysia script - where we are all consumed by fighting what is essentially a racial fight.

The thing about this script is, it works even when the actors swap roles.

Between 2008 and now, we seem to have gone through almost every imaginable combination of the following actors: Umno, PAS, PKR, DAP and Bersatu.

And through it all, the script hasn’t changed one bit.

Firstly, whoever is...