Malaysiakini reader Penan expresses what appears to be a politically savvy opinion: he takes into account the 'behind-the-scenes' constraints faced by Pak Lah in the campaign he has declared against corruption. He names names.

It is not my purpose to argue against his analysis, but against the all-too-common attitude it stands for. We Malaysians are so used to being helpless against corruption, so conditioned to seeing it conducted blatantly and with impunity before our eyes, that we tend to sit in our coffee shops or on our armchairs declaring either that Pak Lah will fail or that he is merely vote-fishing, or that he is not powerful enough to carry out this resolution.

Are we so habituated to being powerless, so afraid to hope for something better, that when a leader comes along who says the right things and starts doing the right things, all we can do is sit around shaking our heads going tsk-tsk, foreseeing failure or diagnosing insincerity? What an idle bunch of complainers we would be if we missed the opportunity to be part of this anti-corruption drive which every one of us wants in our heart of hearts to succeed, rather than the usual bunch of complainers sitting safely by the roadside.

People who are used to bad things are often afraid to believe that things could get better. They dare not hope. This has probably happened to us. We may have developed a comfort zone in which we sit on our backsides assuring each other that things will never get better. We do not wonder for a moment if our own sophisticated complacency and cynicism is part of the problem. We can analyze things all the way down to what's going to happen to whom behind the scenes of the Umno general assembly but we fail to account for our own agency, our own responsibility. We too are part of this story.

I am thinking of the coming general election. Whether and how far Pak Lah has the power to carry out his drive against corruption will depend very much on how much support he can get from the rakyat. If Penan already 'knows' at this early stage that Pak Lah will fail, this can only be because he has forgotten that we are still a democracy, however imperfect.

A campaign against an evil so deeply rooted in our society and leadership as corruption can only succeed with mass support. If our only response to Pak Lah's efforts is to sit around practicing sophisticated political forecasting, we indeed show how clever, but also how immature, we are as citizens, how accustomed to the infantile attitude of waiting for all change in this country to happen from the top. If we let this good man fail to do what he says he will do because we were too busy sitting around reading the tea leaves, we will deserve to sit around indefinitely foreseeing failure and diagnosing insincerity everywhere.

We cannot let Pak Lah fail. In the coming general elections we have the opportunity to help ensure that the he obtains the mandate to carry out a thorough cleaning up of our political culture. Penan is right. The corrupt bosses will not take Pak Lah's efforts lying down. However, this should not just be a struggle between Pak Lah and the vested interests. The rakyat should speak up. I hope the crystal-ball gazers, the 'kopi tiam' political commentators and the armchair pundits among us are not too busy complaining, naysaying and prognosticating to actually exercise the power of their vote when the elections come around.