It arrives every year with the strange stillness of something everyone knows, but few are willing to touch.

There are no serious national hearings, no shared public mourning, no open civic ritual, no national reckoning worthy of the wound.

It is remembered mostly as a warning. Do not play with race. Do not provoke. Do not reopen old wounds. However, this silence is not healing. It is obedience mistaken for peace.

May 13 was never supposed to become quiet. A tragedy of that scale should have made the country more truthful, not more careful.

It should have forced Malaysia to ask what kind of nation it was building, who had been left behind, who had been made afraid, and who benefited when fear became political currency.

Instead, May 13 became a...