KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 16 — There’s nothing to celebrate.

The last time I felt proud to be Malaysian was in 2008. I won’t catalogue our descent into lunacy since then. You’d have to be living under a decent sized rock to not know how our country is right now.

There are no metrics for stupidity but if any brave soul out there were to attempt a census I would confidently venture we are the region’s leading manufacturer of the stuff right now, with enough volume for export. Ditto bigotry and religious extremism. At least none can accuse us of not consuming our own product.

Also, my health hasn’t been great of late, and I was having some tests done.

So no, there’s nothing to celebrate.

Not to draw blunt analogies, but there I was, stuck for a week in a place I couldn’t leave, with neighbours I couldn’t choose.

There was a teacher from a government school founded by Christians. (No prizes for guessing his ethnicity.) His school kept calling. Yes, they understood he was in hospital. They just wanted to check in on him to make sure he would finish marking his exam papers. I asked him, couldn’t a colleague take up the slack? He replied there weren’t many people wanting to teach in public schools. And then there are the quotas. Ah yes, the quotas.

There was a civil engineer. He was there to get his esophagus operated on. His treatment will be free, but he’s had to wait several months for this operation, and he only got bumped up because the doctors felt his frequent visits indicated a pattern of worrying decline (respiratory, blood pressure, sugar levels, heart).

And then there was the guy who annoyed me with his snoring until we got to chatting and I learned his nose was broken. He had not resisted, in fact had offered his car keys along with his wallet to his assailants. They accepted these gifts but wanted entertainment as well so they punched him till they broke his nose. “At least I didn’t get shot.” We’re such a tolerant, silver lining lot, we Malaysians.

When you’re in hospital for a long stay, you want to know two things:

What’s wrong with me and will I get better?

You ask the same when your country is ailing.

In the same year we became Malaysia, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to an audience of 250,000. Photographs show a salt and pepper crowd, blacks and whites at a time when putting even just a few blacks and whites together was dangerous and in many instances, illegal.

250,000. No tear gas, no violence. In fact, people cooperated to decide things like ‘Sandwiches for all, but no mayo cos it might spoil and people will need to the loo. Oh, and let’s get portaloos. A lot of portaloos.’ Desegregation began soon after.

You go ahead and call me unpatriotic for using another nation’s past to illuminate our present. But I bet you can’t find a Malaysian example to match. I’ll let you go back pretty far even. Say, 50 years.

The fact is we are addicted to nostalgia. We look back and moan and mourn because it is allows each of us to be selectively right. Similarly, feeling selectively wronged has become a national pastime. Our unhealthy diet of state propaganda and festive ads has trained us to look to the past, always to the past. Always three races, absent our East Malaysian siblings. Phrases like ‘be grateful’ or ‘never forget’ boilerplate everything from ministry press statements to sermons.

Even without government incitement, we’ve been horrible to each other. Yes, the government wants us separate and distrustful, wants to perpetuate an insecure majority. But it cannot force us to mistreat each other. Politicians flocked to the African Ban debacle like flies to excrement, but they didn’t start it. The state ordered the demolition of the surau but it’s every day citizens who tweet and Facebook their rabid approval. We did that all on our own.

An elderly couple came by and asked me if I was a Christian. I said I wasn’t. They asked if they could pray for me, I told them sure. They come every Thursday to pray for people to get better. I told them – and I regret the phrasing of it – that I hoped they would not get more opportunities to pray for me. Wanting to take the edge off my indelicacy (and perhaps compounding it), I asked if the head nurse, who was Malay, knew they did this. They said “Of course.” And in their familiar wave to each other when they left, I saw it was true.

This is the thing that has stayed with me, and that I hold on to. That on an individual level, enough people still know how to treat each other with compassion. That given a little bit of time – in my case, a week – we can see we glimpses that suggest that our nation is not our government. And there are still some things they cannot tell us, force us, to do. I’m an atheist but I pray that average, right-minded Malaysians are not a minority. Minorities are not treated well here.

I’ve recently seen banner ads asking Malaysians to encourage friends and family who have left the country to return: the Returning Expert Programme. It’s quite telling that the inducements are all financial. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I can think of no persuasive social/societal reasons to come back if you’ve left. Depending on the news cycle, some days I feel like leaving myself.

I’m home now.

I didn’t get any of the answers I needed.

I don’t feel better yet but I’m told some of these things take a while.

The formation of Malaysia is by definition, a determined, concerted effort to come together. I have no doubt it felt great in 1963. But it’s 2013. We cannot live nostalgically. We were okay then. We’re not now.

We’re sick, and we need to help each other out.

What’s wrong with us? Will we get better?

I don’t know. Check with me later.

I’m told some of these things take a while.

But I do know this: If we can’t treat each other better, we’ll never be better off.