Dummies’ Guide to the Singapore Pledge (2012 Version)

We, the citizens (*and new immigrants and other shareholders) of Singapore,

pledge ourselves as one united people (*economy),

regardless of race (*please check your population quota under the Ethnic Integration Policy, and check whether your neighbour likes curry),

language (*your mother tongue as spoken by your father; please note Singlish is discouraged, but broken English acceptable)

or religion (*distinct and separate from one another; code of conduct may be needed so that one can be ‘less strict’),

(*regarding queries on sexual identity, please refer to 377A and the latest MOE Breaking Down Bridges programme;

regarding queries on local identity, please check your GRC boundaries every 5 years)

to build a democratic (*Asian-style, not western-style like a world-class parliament; as agreed upon by the majority of 60%)

society (*based on shared values of Confucian ethics for pragmatism; please refer to the 1991 White Paper, or any book on ‘hard truths’ that may be banned in Malaysia)

based on justice (*ISA to be invoked whenever applicable)

and equality (*a ‘multiracial meritocracy’, ie. some may have more equality than others)

so as to achieve happiness (*Singapore standard, not Bhutan standard),

prosperity (*as measured by GDP and inflation rate, not salary increment or welfare spending for the less fortunate;

as measured by property prices and height of condominiums, not HDB floor area;

as measured by the number of highways created by bulldozers, not the MRT train frequency or reliability;

as measured by the volume of subterranean shopping space in Orchard Road, and also amount of water storage, otherwise known as ‘ponding’)

and progress for our nation (*our neoliberal globalised economy under Temasek).

SMRT Saga: The Racism Episode

It could all be so simple, if we just focused on the question of social responsibility and related ethics in our public transport system. But instead of addressing issues of accountability in the upkeep of the MRT system to ensure safety and reliability, our attention has been sidetracked by the emergence of one villain after another in the ongoing SMRT saga. And in a most dramatic twist, on the pertinent question of hiring train officers to cater to commuters of diverse language groups, the onus suddenly rests on netizens to gag themselves on any racial issue? Singapore is indeed a strange place and running down with too much negative energy.

Just when you thought the angry flaming by netizens had reached its heights with the widely circulated image of CEO Saw Phaik Hwa on a sedan-chair aspiring to Cleopatra-style grandeur, MP Seng Han Thong stole our attention with an episode all his own, in broken English no less, claiming that Malay and Indian staff have problems with conversing in English. And just when an apology for the racialist remark might have appeased the public, Law Minister Shanmugam is throwing his weight to turn a witch-hunting game around on The Online Citizen, saying its report on Seng’s remarks was ‘false’. One can be forgiven indeed for losing the plot here, but let’s rewind back a little for a clearer picture.

First of all, it can easily be argued that TOC was right in highlighting the incident, for any singling out of ethnic groups on employment issues by a politician of any party, in direct or indirect speech, would constitute news of public interest, especially when the man is also advisor to the National Transport Workers’ Union. It is common news sense and no expert in journalism can dispute that. In fact it is when you have a group of broadcast journalists nodding their heads without questioning the man, that it reflects a serious lack of critical thinking in our media. The question for TOC (which is run by volunteers) is how soon it should follow up its newsflash with a more balanced report in order to maintain its image as a credible news source.

There are MPs defending Seng, saying he is not a racist. But what is a ‘racist’? Any one of us may have a friend or even a family member who may make some racialist remarks sometimes. Do they need to be exposed in public and reported to the police? Apparently not. In fact in the three cases involving racist remarks or postings on the net recently, none has been charged, instead the ‘consensus’ according to Minister in charge of Muslim Affairs Yaacob Ibrahim was that there should just be some code of conduct on the internet. By the same token the public can also expect that a similar code of conduct be applied to any public figure speaking on television. It does not augur well for the credibility of the government when license for an anti-racism demonstration is not granted while racialist comments seem liberated now with a new-found leeway.

The point is not to be so uptight about any comment related to race, language or religion that, to use a football analogy, we must raise a red card every time somebody makes a clumsy tackle, and throw the person out of the game altogether. But if we do not even blow the whistle on any racialist comment and question the message behind, the game may becoming more unruly and rougher at the expense of the docile, until some breaking point when all hell breaks loose, we have seen things like that before. And if we do not take a strong stand, what message are we giving to the Singapore society, especially to the younger generation who take after their elders? Racism is not dangerous only when somebody is physically attacked and venomously insulted, it often takes the form of casual remarks and ‘innocuous’ stereotyping among people around us. If we just let it go in the public media, we are allowing people to be mentally programmed into thinking that members of certain minorities are indeed inferior or less ‘normal’.

The point in highlighting racialist comments is not to engage in a ritual of witch-hunting, whereby you set your enemy on fire out of anger and then go home feeling balance in the world is restored. Even more importantly, it is not to take the opportunity to emote your own stereotyping of any ethnic or cultural group that you think the person represents. The fact that Seng used to be deputy editor of Lianhe Zaobao just means that he of all people should have been more sensitive in re-interpreting any ethnic-related issue, it should not mean that any Chinese Singaporean with a Chinese or bilingual education background is therefore bigoted against others.

It is an interesting coincidence that Seng’s incident took place just a couple of days after news that Chia Thye Poh, a political prisoner detained for 32 years, made his first public speech in decades, as he received the Lim Lian Geok Spirit Award in Malaysia. In his speech, Chia, an early graduate of the Nanyang University which was eventually closed down in 1980, stated that the purpose of establishing Nantah “was to serve the society of Southeast Asia, irrespective of races”, that the university had departments for Chinese language, modern languages and Malay language, and it promoted intercultural exchanges. Clearly any past branding of Chinese Singaporean according to race, language or education background is over-generalising if not outright prejudiced. Our history should not be seen as an endless cycle of people from different ethnic or language backgrounds taking turns to oppress one another.

It is also disturbing to hear the way PAP MPs and ministers vehemently emphasise that Seng is not a ‘racist’, for we need to be wary if the underlying implication is that there would be some other ‘genuine’ cases of racists or Chinese chauvinists out there, waiting to be hunted down. We do not really want politicians of any party politicising the issue of racism and identifying any individual as the bogeyman for their own political gains, what we want is just to make sure there is no racial discrimination or stereotyping becoming the norm in Singapore.

It is high time for all sides to take a step back. Politicians and public intellectuals in Singapore on their parts need to stop thinking of netizens as a mob that is prone to being manipulated, stop characterising them as anti-PAP, anti-establishment and so on, for any such branding of people as being emotional and irrational is also dehumanising and not helpful.

Train officers of SMRT are clearly all working very hard during this holiday season, regardless of their language background, and surely speakers of all official languages are just as important in helping the young and old. All the assurance we need is that nobody be placed at a disadvantage due to his or her ethnic origin, among workers as with commuters.

From A Christmas Sermon on Peace by Martin Luther King, December 1967:

Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, and we’ll still love you. But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

On Liberty in the Social Media and a Practice Target for Dialogue

With the chain of cases involving racist or Islamophobic remarks within the space of a week this month, one could already sense a nagging voice coming our way (even before Minister Yaacob Ibrahim’s pat-on-the-back statement) that spells this for the net: ‘code of conduct’. But unlike MP Zaqy Mohamad who appeared to be advocating self-censorship in response to the YPAP case, many a netizen had held that the point is not to gag any bigoted view by invoking the Sedition Act, which is simply isolating the symptoms, but to get to the roots of the bigotry.

For anybody old enough should know the secret ‘Golden Rule’ in our society – no, not “Do unto others as you would others do unto you”, but “Do as you will but don’t get caught”. It is high time that there be some open and respectful dialogue on racial issues instead of encouraging the malaise of bigotry to infest in private corners away from sight, or inviting a cure that may be worse than the disease (if technology is available, we may all have to be brain-scanned for mind crimes one day!).

There are three messages we can glean from such hate speech or discriminatory remarks, not peculiar to multicultural Singapore per se but perhaps copied from a Eurocentric perspective: 1. Some people mentally associate the Muslim community with terrorism. 2. Some people see the value system in the Muslim faith as being absolutely different from that of the society they themselves like to have. 3. Some people see nothing wrong at all in making fun of anybody’s religion.

If one carries the first two mental attitudes to the point of stereotyping members of the community, you have a kind of essentialising and a discriminatory attitude that is not unlike racism. And if you combine the first and the third, you may produce something like the Danish cartoon controversy, a conflict which was heightened by the European championing of media freedom and the Muslim view on visual images which was not respected.

Some may consider the whole thing then as simple as a matter of moderating between our values for freedom and our values for mutual respect. (Let’s not go down the road now about ‘freedom’ being also an ‘F’ word misused by George W. Bush to wage a ‘war for peace’.) Actually, these should as simple as values we learnt back in kindergarten, about how to play and to be polite, it’s basically the same thing you learn anywhere you go; it is not like only if you went to a PAP kindergarten, then are you a fuller human being who is more likely to fight for justice and equality in Hong Lim Park.

But the world would be a much happier place if only life is as simple as in kindergarten. The game being played now may be more of a trickery. Imagine someone hears your religion preaches turning the other cheek, and comes to test it by slapping your face left and right nonstop. If you resist, he may say what your religion teaches does not hold true; if you simply ignore, he may push you further next time; and if you cry foul to whom you regard as authority, you may also be called names for having the authority side you. Therefore one really has to be careful with any recourse that may begin with a premise of what former Foreign Minister George Yeo phrased as some groups being “less likely to riot” than others, which may end up reinforcing a stereotype of violence, not to mention creating a sense of exceptionalism. The principle should be common: what is considered taboo is always specific to the religious community.

John Stuart Mill, who argued for the principle of absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment for the individual in his classic treatise On Liberty (1859), also stated a second principle on liberty of tastes and pursuits in doing as one likes without impediment from others, with the condition: “so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong”. That one of his biggest fans today is the Norwegian right-wing mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, known for hating Muslims, has to be totally incidental or warped of course. Mill was at least able to point out some maxim in the Koran with regards to governance that is more progressive than what can be found in the New Testament; he also argued ‘diversity’ of character and culture as a key to progress, lamenting that the Europe he saw was “advancing towards the Chinese ideal of making all people alike”.

But what we have to guard ourselves against in Mill’s liberalist ideas is a utilitarianism that justified colonialism and the dismantling of traditional cultures seen as ‘backward’. Mill may be helpful when cited for reforms in human rights, but not helpful when we need to conserve the values of our cultures and communities, for Mill championed individualism. Anyway, there are always possibilities of customs in any religion and culture changing over time, even laws may be reformed, but branding any community as being incapable of progress is not an opinion that is helpful, not to mention that the particular conceptions of ‘progress’ may be problematic in the first place.

Negative or insensitive remarks do not make a pleasant start for a dialogue, but there is a chance for us to make something constructive out of the discord. The worst that we can do is to magnify any isolated cases so much as to disturb societal harmony. Opinions can be judged and debated as to whether they are valid and sound, whether they are constructive, and whether they respect cultural sensitivities. The old model of tolerance among religions as simply “not talking about it”, like what three-quarter of 2800 surveyed secondary school students expressed in 2008, clearly is not working. We need to ask in what way the moral education in our society may have failed us, not expend energy in wondering if any individuals have flunked their lesson in conduct. And for God’s sake, stop racialising top students who have just received their PSLE results as Indian or Malay or Eurasian! Are we comparing report cards among different ethnic groups in their contribution to economic progress, instead of addressing general social mobility?

The Sacrifice for Justice and Equality

This year has just seen the passing of another champion of human rights and victim of ISA in Singapore – lawyer Francis Khoo Kah Siang, who had lived the last 34 years of his life in exile before his demise last Sunday in London. Francis Khoo had fought for the causes of poor fishermen and factory workers, protested against the Vietnam War and participated in a campaign to save The Herald newspaper, before he was wanted by the ISD during the security operation against alleged ‘Euro-communists’ in February 1977, when at least 28 professionals and intellectuals were arrested and imprisoned.

He escaped from Singapore just two weeks after marrying Dr Ang Swee Chai, later to be known not only as a prominent surgeon but also founder of the British charity, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and author of From Beirut to Jerusalem; the book reflected her transformation from being a fundamentalist Christian “who hated Arabs and saw the Palestinian Liberation Organisation as terrorists”, to a sympathiser of the Palestinian people after witnessing the Sabra-Shatila Massacre in 1982. Francis Khoo was also involved in various international charities apart from being a supporter of freedom movements like the African National Congress and PLO.

His demise is another sad story this year following the death of former political detainee and lawyer Tan Jing Quee, who had legendarily contested in the 1963 election as Barisan Sosialis and lost to Rajaratnam in Kampong Glam by mere 220 votes, before he was arrested under ISA and detained till 1966. During his last years, he was researching, writing and editing books on Singapore’s leftist movements despite his failing eyesight, and saw the publication of The May 13 Generation just a month before succumbing to cancer. In a tribute to him in June, Francis Khoo described him as a ‘bridge’ between generations, territories and communities, one who was fluent in English, Mandarin and Malay and believed in the unity of the Malayan people with Singapore as an integral part.

Will their examples awaken Singaporeans to the cause of peace, justice and equality that they have sacrificed for? Will we see a new generation of Singaporeans who treasure some ideals beyond a utilitarian attitude towards life?

Taking this opportunity to repost a blog published elsewhere in September during the government’s reiteration on ISA being “relevant and necessary”…  

The New Obscene Normality – Who Needs Justice and Equality in Singapore

Enough is enough with the complaint about Singaporeans being apathetic and gutless. Now that the Malaysian Government is repealing the Internal Security Act and leaving Singapore behind in the dirt road of history where democracy is concerned, this arbitrary deprivation of human rights in the name of national security is just glaring in our face as an obstacle to progress.

It has been this dehumanising tool of terror that broke the lives and efforts of past activists and opposition leaders, and along with the state-controlled media as well as laws restricting freedom of assembly and expression, stifled the imagination of the people these past decades by drilling into their minds that there can be no alternative to the one-party system.

More than that, such conditioning has resulted in a dulling of both mind and spirit of the masses, which, like domesticated animals, have learnt to leave all processes in the food chain to the care of the government and acquired the instinct of recoiling from any word or action that may seem ‘confrontational’.

It is only with the influx of immigrants, as born and bred citizens of Singapore suddenly find themselves losing in the race of survival of the fittest (or survival of the cheapest), to what seems like invasive species disturbing the balance in our small pond of ecology here, that one starts to snarl with resentment now.

All along, the only protest everybody seems to know is that little cross on the ballot just once every five years to mark support for the opposition. GE2011 however finds Singaporeans learning to make some noise again like they have never done in an entire generation. With the recent presidential election, the crowds are booing in stadiums at any mention of PAP-endorsed candidate Dr Tony Tan. (There was even said to be booing at him as elected president during an international football game.)

But seriously, can we do better than that? All this negative energy, whatever is it for? Just because one doesn’t like his pompous spectacles and his plastic-looking hair? Or because the prestige he represents and the obligatory support of clan associations and chambers of commerce he enjoys seem as old-school as a feudalistic society?

Incidentally, Tony of all the four Tans happens to be the one who is most defensive of the ISA, but frankly, did that cause as much outrage as the story about special treatment of his sons during NS? The point here is not whether we can call Singaporeans to arms to emulate Malaysians in a Bersih movement, but is there a danger of people becoming a mob without any tactic except being anti-government or anti-elitism?

Are we going from apathetic to just resentful and indignant, because we have lost faith that our interests are being served? Are we voting for one candidate just because he may help to protect our CPF money, or another candidate just because he takes keen interest in certain problems of investment?

Are we celebrating Curry Day because we treasure the unique multiculturalism we have in Singapore, or just because we want to insist on a Singaporeans-first treatment to the exclusion of foreigners? Isn’t it too damn easy? We are happily eating to show our love for Singapore, when people in India are renouncing food in a hunger strike against corruption?

If alternative voices are to be heard in Singapore, the game surely has to be stepped up, for we are entering a new era today. One-third of Singaporeans may call it the new normal, while those less approving would think of it as an obscene normality. This is no time to feel shy about any exception to general principles, only the bold will triumph by talking one’s way out or by adamantly denying any irregularity.

It is not just how Home Affairs Ministry’s refuted the joint statement on 19 September by 16 ex-ISA detainees on being held for their political beliefs, how it insisted whatever social activism in 1980s was linked to the the Communist Party of Malaya. (Where is the independent body who can judge?) As the latest onslaught of WikiLeaks shows, reality can be more warped than fiction. You thought the Singapore government only looked into feasibility of nuclear energy last year? Well the deputy CEO of the Energy Market Authority Lawrence Wong (now minister-of-state for defence and education) was talking to the US Embassy about it with keen interest back in 2008! You thought the Singapore authorities just have a soft spot for bus drivers, doctors and beer promoters from China? Well the ruling party’s youth wing Young PAP has been nurturing close ties with China’s Communist Youth League for many years, seeking inspiration in a Beijing party school for its own political training!

And would you have guessed, the Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs Yaacob Ibrahim has children who are American citizens just like his wife? (His poor son, it is decided for him in a public statement that he will serve his NS in Singapore, guess he better work on his Malay as Foreign Language!) Yet another cable reveals the frustration of younger Straits Times journalists over press controls, being stifled by editors who have been groomed to follow the government line instead of encouraging more investigative and critical reporting, especially since ministers routinely call up editors regarding coverage. Not that any reader would be surprised – the newspaper has habitually been most investigative when it comes to voices of dissent, like an overt counterpart of the ISD effectively.

But an editor actually decides to come up with an apologist response without sounding apologetic, saying one would have gladly admitted journalism here is kept on a leash if anybody had asked. It’s a bit like, come on, let’s be adult about it, what’s wrong with a red light district in Singapore, the police is well aware of it and the prostitutes are in full cooperation with them, it’s those without approved license that we worry about, right? In fact, it looks like the police controls the business!

The most blatant appendage of the one-party system reared its ugly head when Aljunied MP Chen Show Mao from Worker’s Party had to be de-invited by organisers from a Hungry Ghost celebration event, due to pressure from CCC under People’s Association. PA soon practically admitted to being a party organ of PAP, by making a statement to assert its authority in appointing grassroots advisers, saying that opposition MPs cannot be expected to play this role in their own wards. Well anyone aware of the PAP-grassroots-advisor-turned-MP story in Potong Pasir ought to be wary of such patterns.

It is no secret that PA served to counter the influence of the Barisan Socialis party back in the 1960s. Some may consider the incident as trivial as the story of an NSP supporter being barred from using a CC toilet while wearing a ‘political’ T-shirt. But how can one afford to let go when every inch of public space has to be fought here, when whoever occupying the throne would never give so much leeway to others? The SDP has pointed out how abnormal it is for a democracy, that an opposition party is not even allowed to visit university campuses or talk to residents in open areas in housing estates.

To show that it is moving beyond gutter politics, the incumbent party really needs to do more than posing in gay-friendly pictures next to a celebrity like Kumar. (Come on, he is so drag, when he came out saying he is gay, everybody must be waiting for the real punchline. How about 377A, which can still be used as a weapon against citizens?) What the MPs can do instead when the Parliament convenes, is to make at least pretence of thinking aloud on the issue of ISA, just to demonstrate there is no groupthink and prove that all the salaries for Singapore’s limited talent pool are not going down the john. (Never mind for now the phenomenal income of the President of Singapore, the one who lost S$14 billion while in charge of the GIC and is now supposed to guard the national reserves.)

One can always make a beautiful speech about strengthening bonds between different ethnic communities as part of psychological defence. (How about a Halloween party for religious harmony? We may not agree on which God or deities to worship, but every culture should know of lost souls and aggrieved spirits!) Or how about better education and employment opportunities for the minorities?

Better still, upstage the opposition by adapting Workers’ Party suggestion for specific anti-terrorism laws. Why should we rely on such an outdated law to fight terrorism, if not to make up for lack of intelligence and lack of evidence? Are we trying to prove there is equality in Singapore by reserving power to detain anybody regardless of race, language or religion, regardless of Islamist terrorism, Chinese chauvinism or general leftist dissidence?

The final verdict on us Singaporeans, if one may judge by the less than adequate support for a party like SDP with its banner of justice during GE, is that we are more utilitarian than idealistic. That means as long as economic benefits here are tangible, most of us would not lose our sleep thinking how some people have to sacrifice years of freedom for their political beliefs (former opposition MP Chia Thye Poh suffered 23 years of detention and 9 years of house arrest, lest anyone has historical amnesia), or if the government decides to put away some people believed to have terrorist tendencies, as a form of preventive detention in the name of social stability.

The Universal Periodic Review process for Singapore at the UN Human Rights Council last Thursday probably sounds as alien to people here as an occurrence galaxies away. (UN’s call for an independent election body sounds heaven-sent for the democratic process here but is unheeded, again no surprise.)

Nevertheless, we tend to be irked by the lack of social justice or equality, when certain people seem to enjoy a better life just by nobility of birth or by ethnic or national origin. We may not buy an empty word like ‘meritocracy’ any longer, if it seems an indefinite and absurd stretching of what Aristotle formulated eons ago before Greece’s impending bankruptcy: ‘Equality for equals, inequality for unequals’.

With the high costs of living and little job security today, the free lifestyle that Singapore is keen on protecting from harm may seem as removed from the masses as the casinos and the F1 race (the Singapore government wouldn’t mind helping Sumatra put out forest fires, so that F1 spectators can enjoy a clear view of cars zooming by!).

News released this month on three men being detained for terrorism-related activities, along with the setting up of a new terrorism research centre (headed by one Rohan Gunaratna of Playboy interview fame: moderate Muslims “don’t have the willpower or the ability” to fight terrorism. “That’s why the West must work with moderate regimes and people.”), are apparently events timed in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of September 11.

But the resorting to ISA once again may be understood by the man in the street today as none other than an opportunist weapon to help the ruling class maintain the status quo, in a post-colonial society where only freedom of the privileged is safeguarded. It is a system of justice that is arguably totalitarian in reasoning, and how far citizens of Singapore should endure such unlimited power, will be a question to be tested as part of the political game.

Teenage Tragedy in Ang Mo Kio (Voices on Facebook, part II)

II. We Don’t Need No Education?

An 18-year-old half-Japanese girl fell to her death in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 6 on Saturday 14 May. While the Shin Min Daily News report suggested that the suicide was due to relationship problems, her personal blog reveals other possible causes of psychological stress:

“I hope this is the end of my journey to a local university. No exhorbitantly-priced private institutions for me please. Fucking lao kui for me only.” – from an earlier entry in her blog. (lao kui: embarassing, shameful)

“PSLE, I fucked up. Couldn’t get into dream secondary school. ‘O’ Levels, I fucked up. Couldn’t get a place in dream polytechnic course… I got my dreams crushed again, after seeing my ‘A’ Levels grades yesterday. Bye bye to NUS FASS and NTU Humanities.” - from the last posting in her blog.

Below are two threads of Facebook discussion on this tragic case, as to what is to blame – the streaming system? Globalisation of the universities? Family environment? Societal pressure? Lack of counselling? – Or perhaps more importantly, what can possibly be done on ‘our’ part:

(See end credits for contributors to the discussion)

Thread 1 (Z’s wall):

Teenage girl falls to her death at Ang Mo Kio

(Link: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/teenage-girl-falls-her-death-ang-mo-kio-140049870.html)

D: oh dear

S: God damned tragedy.

Z: sad. i think the pressure comes from a ‘meritocratic’ society that knows more snobbery than compassion.

SP: That’s why I stand behind my stance of scrapping the way we stream now and say that we follow what I read the Japanese system to be

Z: how do u see the japanese system?

SP: What I read (I’ve been trying to find it again, but cannot for some reason.) is that children are streamed quite early on into different fields based on capability, languages, arts, and maths/science. They still do the basics of the other fields, so as to be multifaceted, but start specialising in certain things rather young. Granted, it’s based on results as well, but it’s certainly much better to classify via different abilities as opposed to academically good, academically normal, academically behind. Which is how our current system is viewed, and said views translate into how their capabilities, work ethic and intelligence must be,

Z: sounds like something worth exploring. but ultimately, if a student wants to study a particular course, one hopes the chances of gaining entry is not too slim due to increasing student population and limited places in two top universities. is the gap in standard between these two universities and the others really so big and does the gap need to be maintained?

SP: Ah, this touches on something that I wonder with regards to art’s schools, and how as they become more recognised they become more expensive and snobby because the standard is supposedly high, till talented people with no money cannot get in and mediocre people with money do.

But back to topic. I guess it all boils down to what standard are they aspiring for. As for the is it really so big, does it need to be so big, those are determined against certain global markers, yea? Not that the entire global system of universities does not need to re-look how they do things. Although I guess if we stopped looking at tertiary/degree level education as a cash-producing industry, things could probably be loosened up a bit.

…

Thread 2 (A’s wall):

E:

Z: sad…

SA: Do u think there’s a flaw in our education system? Hence this girl’s dissapointment and thus suicide? Or is it just her own doing?

Z: relationship problem is common, but could it be that our society stresses so much on academic achievements that some teenagers feel inferior and worthless when they can’t make it to above average?

B: sad…

Z: it’s disturbing to read her blog: “I hope this is the end of my journey to a local university. No exhorbitantly-priced private institutions for me please. Fucking lao kui for me only.”

Z: “Sometimes I feel people are undeserving of what they have. I’m not only talking about spoilt, rich brats who have everything even though they have never worked a single day in their entire lives. In general I despise people who don’t cherish what they already have.”

A: We will never know where the blame lies. Multi-factorial I supposed.

Z: sure, there are many factors. but i also wonder if we do not have enough room in the universities to allow students a chance to develop.

A: For me, I feel that if that is the case in Singapore, then parents should think twice if they want to have children. Either do not have any or if you do, make sure you have the money to send them abroad if they fail in the local system. If you can’t have that safety net, you shouldn’t have children in Singapore.

Z: population growth is a worldwide problem. i’m lucky to be in Germany where public universities charge little or no tuition fees. in Australia, apparently local students are complaining that the universities are wooing foreign students so much so that it make places less available and it drives the fees up. i hope Singapore will not go a similar way of making education so commercial.

A: Sorry Z. I’m going to cut and paste something I wrote in response to D on a thread discussion. Too tired to tweak it to an apt response to our discussion. Please bear with me.

For me, when I do “protest” and not have a maid or… when I opt not to bring life into this world but still choose to live in Singapore, I see that as not giving up. I see that as hope. If we have (hopefully ‘had’) a ruling party that has been blind to our pleas, then what can we do? Either leave or stay and protest. Some protest and are detained, sued till bankrupt. And some of us protest is other ways which see us surviving and not suffering the persecution other activists have. That is hope, isn’t it? And now, there is a breakthrough (well sort of, remains to be seen in the near future) at the ballot box cos enough Singaporeans want heart and soul and not just $ and GDP.

Sad as it is, the ruling party (supposed to be cream of the crop) is not perceptive enough to work out the root cause of our social ailments. They all (fertility rate going down, suicide rate going up, brain-drain etc…) are symptoms of their option to pursue economic excellence at the expense of all else. Perhaps it’s their blind spot as they can’t see that there is any other way the country should progress. Can’t see, never mind. Don’t want to listen to the ground some more. Also because they feel they own the monopoly of wisdom.

Ok. We all know the above.

What do we, the citizens do in the meantime? We keep only engaging the government to make improvements or to change their mindsets. Ok. That’s fine. But in the meantime, concurrently, were we doing anything else? We were trying to see if the people sector, on our own could work together to build alternative communities? We can’t even do that amongst ourselves (civil society, artists etc…). We can’t process alternative environments…we are not creative enough? Not imaginative enough? Not resourceful enough? Do not know how to work amongst ourselves? Which eventually make us go back to the ruling party. Which make us rely on them more than ever. And now, we are relying on the opposition party to save us.

I don’t believe that the ruling party nor the opposition are the only source of our redemption. I strongly believe it also depends on how we, the citizens, work out the way we want to collaborate to create alternative environments. And we can only do that if we take accountability and responsibility. When we become the true stakeholders who take our very own destinies in our very own hands and deal with our immediate reality with more urgency, sharing resources and capital to develop our capacity to be fully human. If the ruling party transforms and / or the opposition party succeeds in parliament, then it is a bonus. Where is the “we” taking responsibility? We have lost the sense of community. But instead of whining and complaining, what are we doing about it? Every suicide becomes a societal problem? Or we point the finger at the ruling party and their economic-obsessed policies? Sigh! It’s passe. We all know the tiger doesn’t change its spots. We vote opposition, but tons of SIngaporeans will vote the ruling party back in eventually. Sure, WP has a GRC now and ruling party’s shared votes are down. But for me, the most effective way is to, concurrent to the relative progress made in parliamentary politics, have the people sector wake up and work to develop our capacity to transcend differences and work towards our common goal of an alternative Singapore. I don’t even dream that it can be achieved in my lifetime. But are we even starting to look at each other and not at father all the time?

Z: thanks A. we can’t reduce a tragic case like this to any simple root cause, and we can’t point our finger at any one single sector. if we attempt to, we can only summarise it as a meritocracy gone wrong. there are things that need to be changed at the policy level, but there are also ways of showing care for a teenager, not just from a teacher or counsellor but also from family and friends, and from the social environment as a whole, from a world that can choose to send a message across that money or academic achievement isn’t everything, and that there are other ways of developing education. Even if we feel the message each of us sends out to the world is too negligible to be heard, we should not shy away from sending it.

A: so for this tragic case, you’re saying all the channels she had accessed to failed her?

SL: after reading this news, i felt really fucked up and pissed off on an extreme level. only a week ago i proposed for a class that i’m teaching about educating and embracing failure as something that oppose to the whole ideology of excelling …that i noticed in almost all education system has come to reached to an extreme twisted level. I believe that we should be properly educating our younger generations that failure doesn’t mean a full stop. if all of you have noticed, all the schools motto do have something along the line of excel, being the best and all that bullshit. Not everyone can excel, not everyone is cut out to be the best. the idea is not to outcast but to understand that failure needs to be acknowledged and to help realize a journey to take on. what our educators and institutions has been promoting is not fear, but phobia of failure or fear of taking risks that is supported by the whole streaming bullshit system that doesn’t help younger generations realize what they can really do and who they are and can be.

SL: just to add a bit more.. education shouldn’t be about how well you can do your math, or what qualification you have or possess as a stepping stone to the next level. Education should encompass everything, from success to failure, learning to win and more importantly, learning to fail.

Z: A, do u think i can have your permission to copy the discussion in this thread into a note and just post it out in facebook to my friends? (names will be abbreviated to protect identities)

A: I’m fine cos I’m always looking for opinions.

Z: thanks…

SL: sorry if i came off too angsty. this poor girl stays across the street from my old neighborhood that i grew up in. so i could actually visualize the whole space and the environment she grew up in in my head.

A: Not at all .. I appreciate your expressing your thoughts so honestly. It’s not angsty to me.

SL: Well, I lived in AMK blk … for a good 19 years before i moved to punggol about 10 years ago. AMK has a very warmth and real heartland feel to it, the area I lived in are rather old now a little too stuck in the 80s if you know what i mean…. I studied in the neighborhood schools there … and was the first batch of victims to go through EM3 and normal technical stream. i can still recall that all the schools overly emphasize on the concept of excelling and being the best or the top. i grew up in an average home, nothing fancy, but the whole pursue of excellence among my friends and community was just driving me crazy. I’m out of the school system for almost 15 years now, i still can recognize that pressure that goes on when i go back to visit AMK.

…

Thread 1 (further comments):

EO: i don’t know. instinctively i reach for the parents. mass education wasn’t and still isn’t designed for individual talent development; that’s too labour intensive to do justice to in classes. mass education is for training a labour force, for political orientation. i say leave the system alone. it’s the plague of the developing country: life trapped in a vortex of employment-centrism. industrial britain and america went through the same phases. more important is for civil society to raise awareness that life > just work in parents, but that takes a certain level of material comfort sustained over a few generations.

SY: hi i just checked internet after a few relaxing days.

in my personal experience dealing with children and youth, the system doesn’t stress them up as much as their parents do. does any report speak about the relationships in her family?

SH: i don’t really have much to say about Krystal’s death, because I do not know her personally, and I think her death (and life) should be her own, at least for now. (I’m probably just old-fashioned that way.)

I also don’t know enough about the… family dynamics, so I will leave that out for now.

However, what I can comment on is the education system, I suppose. I think we all need our spaces and structures; i don’t really think we can ‘improve’ the system by tacking more stuff onto it. A big problem is that there’s too much stuff (and not enough space) in the systems we shape and are shaped by, until ‘system’ is no longer a subset of ‘reality’, but ‘reality’ is a subset of ‘system’.

(I’m adding to the problem now, perhaps, by talking about the system. The more you ascribe power to the system, the more it actually has. So bear with me for a while, as I try to exorcise these demons.)

Perhaps our main watchwords for our society are ‘industry’ and ‘efficiency’, from which many other things are derived. Our system tries to enforce that, to produce that. Mass education, as E has pointed out above, is meant to train a labour force and politically orient the young into stable (non-disruptive) individuals. That is what the system will encourage and enforce, because it is what it was designed (by us and for us) to do.

SH: ‎(More wall of text follows)

But what if the system isn’t everything? It’s not about whether it’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – or even ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It’s sheer category error. I cannot reasonably expect a housecat to be able to meaningfully choose the colour of my shirt, so why should I meow at the cat and seek its sartorial wisdom?

Similarly, the education system – the political system – the social system – cannot be the end-all and be-all of our needs and wants. More than anything else, society is a community and collection of resources – we can draw from the systems, but we should not let them have more power than they already have, because these machines we build are greedy things, thirsting for blood, oil, and meaning.

I’ll borrow a point from Thomas Malaby, an anthropologist who studies games. He draws reference from Weber’s thesis about modernity – the whole Iron Cage thing – and compares games and bureaucracies, which both have rules, but use them in very different ways.

Bureaucracies create and use rules in an attempt to reduce possibilities to a predictable, easily-regulated order, whereas games create and use rules in an attempt to generate possibilities among several meaningful alternatives.

One aspires to achieve necessity as its ultimate goal, the other seeks to create contingency as its operating principle.

With that in mind, when we create huge systems that try to be too efficient, and we shovel people into various processing points based on various parameters, it is very easy for overpowering sense of helplessness and irrelevance to whack us when we’re down, because we believe in the ‘necessity’ of it all.

Z: Thanks for the precious thoughts. Right now I just wonder if the system is giving us enough information. MOE director of higher education said in 2006, in response to complaints about local students being sidelined, that “about 70% of students from each A-level cohort enter NUS, NTU and SMU”. Now imagine a student who wants to study arts in NUS and wants to know the odds. Or the parents want to know the odds. That figure isn’t helpful enough.

http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/forum/2006/20060429.htm

SH: ‎(Lagi more wall!)

So, how? I don’t advocate tearing down the system, because it works for a lot of people, who will not be able to deal with the sudden change. I also don’t advocate improving (i.e. adding on to) the system, because the system should only have power where it has relevance, and it should not seek to dominate the discussion in the places where it should be silent.

Thus, I think we should focus. We should hold the bureaucrats responsible not just for *what* or *how* they teach; that just muddies the waters. Everyone can learn stuff on their own; internet-fueled autodidacticism, discussion with friends, etc. For most people, knowledge can be obtained from other places, not just schools; learning does not just take place in the academy.

So I think the real importance of education in this society lies in its value as capital, not just in the cultural sense of knowledge, but also as social capital (for networking and talking to others, making friends who can challenge and encourage you, etc) and as symbolic capital (oh, you’re educated, so smart ah).

Thus, we should focus on whether the educational specialists we appoint for our society are providing the services they are *supposed* to be offering. We pretend we are making kids smarter, but actually, we’re conducting a ritual that allows kids to transmute themselves into functional adults.

If the schools we build are not big enough or willing to accept the students from our society who truly need these services – not just those who wish to learn and excel – but also those who wish to seek direction, those who need to talk to others to find themselves, and thus draw inspiration from their peers, who perhaps can show them different horizons and frames of reference for reality…

then we have a problem there. And that problem feeds other problems – stigmas of lao kui, old boys’ networks, etc.

Uh, so I guess that’s my main point (if I had one). I probably rambled off focus there. I want to be a teacher, not because I want to teach, but because I want to help my students learn. Yeah.

JH: Speaking as a mother, I agree that the parental/familial relationship can be the most important influence. However, very often, I find myself unpacking/deconstructing stuff that goes on in school. It becomes a very delicate balance to help your child maintain self-esteem while not destroying his confidence in the system.

While the system may have worked well for a lot of people, I doubt it is perceived to be working as well now, starting from Primary One. Parent who are not kiasu find it hard to insulate and explain to our children why things are the way they are. Parents who do not question the system end up spending tons of money on tuition because the students cannot learn as fast as the syllabus dictate. Parents who cannot afford tuition have to just watch their children get left further and further behind…

It takes a lot of parental thought, reflection and guts to be able to guide your child through the whole system in a way that is appropriate for her, her ability and personality. How many parents can devote that amount of time, with the relentless pressures of tests and homework?

The system itself is not solely to blame. But I think it’s high time to stop blaming and really see how each piece in the picture is in some way contributing to the issue not being solved. I don’t see any political will in managing this issue beyond lip service and beautiful MOE write-ups that are not being translated into practice.

Z: Thanks for sharing that Joo Hymn. I wish there are more people who are alarmed by cases like this and try to convey more positivity and care to students who are under such tremendous pressure. After seeing some defence of the ruling party by the civil servant or regional manager type during the election debate, I do realise that a lot of people in society may be taking that “there will always be people falling thru the cracks, but so what” kind of attitude, and i won’t want to place hope on any change initiated by the system.

…

Facebook Personae Identified:

A – Alvin Tan, theatre practitioner, jaded activist

EO – Eugene Oh, student

JH – Joo Hymn Tan, mother/former pre-school teacher/sometime activist

SH – Shao Han, would-be teacher and sometime berserker

SP – Sean Padman McMenamin, educator/insatiable reader/headbanging gamer-punk

SY – Lin Shiyun, NUS philosophy department drop-out

Z – Z’ming Cik, suspected blogger of this post

‘Sweeping Changes’ in Singapore Politics (Voices on Facebook, part I)

Singaporeans are not much into politics. Singapoeans have too much of politics. Singaporeans read too much tabloid news. Singaporeans don’t read enough into tabloid news.

If we are not part of the solution, are we part of the problem?

I. Showtime and Encore

Barely two weeks after scraping through into power at GE2011, PAP politicians are putting up their best performance to demonstrate that they do hear all voices of the people. Ministers are activating their Facebook accounts and making it known that they are posting thoughts in the virtual world, what has now been identified as the new political frontline. After all, traditional official media like the national ST newspaper (part of the state-monitored press holding company which was created three decades ago in the wake of the historic win by JBJ of the Workers’ Party in one single constituency) have been rubbished by the Gen Y as mere pulp of propaganda.

Hard to say what kind of Pandora’s Box this may open in the unfriendly terrains of opposition supporters and trolls, for even their youngest colleague TPL has burnt her reputation there (or is it just her avatar?), but the Men in White, especially the cabinet ministers who have survived a sweeping ‘radical change’ (reshuffling of portfolio) into a Second Life, just have to put on their best botox smile and strike back.

(Note: this blog post was not meant to be all about politics and the exploitation of social media. Please skip to Part II if you are more keen on hearing a Facebook discussion on education and meritocracy in Singapore, as sparked off by a teenage suicide in Ang Mo Kio a week ago.)

With a vengeance, the ruling party is now going full force in the social media to showcase itself. Following a murder of an Indonesian maid whose body was then thrown into a water tank of a housing block in Woodlands, a young PAP MP decided to perform a stunt just to assure residents that everything is hunky dory. He put up a Youtube video of himself drinking water straight from the tap. But residents did not seem very impressed, as they went on to lodge a complaint against the town council for not alerting them of the incident immediately and expressing fears of previous breaches on hygiene.

Meanwhile, an MP in Mountbatten has posted on Facebook the findings he gathered from a heroic deed – he had ventured into public transport and discovered to his horror that three bus services do not arrive for as much as half an hour. He promises to follow up with SBS and the Public Transport Council. Interestingly, an annual survey by LTA was cited by outgoing Transport Minister Raymond Lim just two weeks ago to show that public transport is ‘heading in the right direction”. (One just had to wait a bit longer?)

In the Lianhe Zaobao over the weekend, one writer Han Yong Mei has remarked on some of the blind spots of the ruling party that have cost it dearly at the election. One is the fact that ‘equal opportunity’ is not something that can be appreciated if it does not quite translate into equality and fairness in real life. Another is the point that ‘dialogue’ is not quite effective communication, if one listens but would not do anything about it anyway; the incumbents can no longer depend on support from voters based on gratitude for past achievements.

The past week, which has seen the official stepping down of SM Goh and MM Lee from the Cabinet to take up new posts as senior advisors at MAS and GIC respectively, has interestingly seen a dramatic outpour of adulation for them in newspapers like ST. One reader called for local film makers to produce historical films to chronicle the legacies of LKY and GCT, while another suggested that Changi Airport be renamed after LKY. Most bizarre was perhaps a certain forum letter entitled “The Debt We Owe MM Lee”, thanking the octogenarian politician for his “selfless contributions, superb leadership and ‘tough’ rules” for creating a safe and comfortable environment with a strong Singapore dollar enabling one to say “Cheap! Cheap!” while shopping in another country. It is almost difficult to say if it was genuine tribute from a die-hard fan, or in fact a veiled satire edited so intelligently to look like a genuine tribute.

(But is has inspired at least one genuine satire on Facebook: ‎”Thank you for giving us such a strong Singapore dollar so we can buy food from all the farmers in the world who don’t know about life. Thank you for giving us such a clean country that we are brought up to litter in the streets only when we are in JB. Thank you for providing such a safe political environment, free from all the commies that helped to put you into power. Thank you for the freedom of speech that we enjoy under the Internal Security Act that gives us a choice to continue talking to ourselves even when we are locked up in prison. Thank you for such an open society where foreigners can come and enjoy and place their bets at the casino any time. Thank you for keeping the trains running even as they are packed to the limit, we know it would have been worse if you never made it expensive for the poor. Thank you for giving us a sense of pride to abuse our domestic workers and look down on students who can’t make it to local universities and can’t afford to study in Australia or UK. Thank you for accepting the high salary long after stepping down just so the newspapers have articles to fill the pages every other day, and above all, thank you for granting a middle class snob like me a voice in the newspapers instead of all the losers out there!”)

Fervent defenders of LKY have actually inspired no less than Singapore’s celebrated novelist Catherine Lim to write a little play on her blog, entitled Island, featuring a character named Supremo, who is sore that he seems foresaken by the electorate, but continues to despise people who are weaklings…  (Doesn’t look like it will become an instant classic, but it may be interesting material for practical criticism by O level literature students who no longer grow up on fairy tales and epics.)

Since election day, many have even fancied revelling to a Youtube club mix of Yam Ah Mee, the deadpan voice of the GE Returning Officer… no need for ‘emotional dilemma’ between the incumbents and the opposition, or between local citizens and foreign talents (or is it really about the fortunate and the less fortunate?) …

There are people of a privileged club, who are desperately hoping to steal the show back from new faces which have suddenly gained popularity without going through the old sanctioned paths of ivy league scholars and army officers. Some of the new faces have so much confidence now (like the WP), they do not shy from sitting at any table and getting photographed with anybody. The old faces may still have their  loyal supporters, who insist that if there is more than one source of voices, it can only be noise. But there are also many now who believe that everybody can have his or her 15 minutes of expression, for there are always different sources of educated or informed opinions.

Being tired of hearing the same voices does not mean one is not interested in being constructive. It should only mean that the game of making constructive changes in society has changed. There is more than one channel to tune in to now, and one needs not just be on the receiving end. Maybe that’s why it’s called the new media?

GE103: Stand Together, ‘Deconstruct’ the Government

If the PAP ever has time to consolidate its losses at this General Election, one might imagine them kicking themselves for not planning a better corporate rebranding exercise, to make themselves look more generous, caring and apologetic despite all failings. Too little, too late, as one may say. But, then again, one would be underestimating the PAP to imagine this: that they rely on positive image and the people’s trust and support alone to stay in power. They may well gamble with government investments now and then, but since when do they ever leave elections to pure chance? No, not even a casino boss would make his roulettes and jackpot machines available to all without ensuring that chances of the game are in his favour.

While the GRC system has always worked splendidly like an enceinte (French. extra ring of fortification) in a castle to defend Singapore’s one-party system, the PAP government has built an extra line of defence this time, a moat filled with water so that voters and opposition members can have a nice dip on “Cooling-off Day” before even reaching the gates of the fortress.

As parties like NSP galvanise supporters and guide them forward like the North Star, the generals standing high on the battlement walls must continue to divert attention by pointing to WP banners of the Hammer and shouting “raid!”. Or to bring it back to reality of our HDB heartland, the PAP is desperately in need of tactics to counter SDP’s successful PR campaign with the well-loved Danny the Democracy Bear. A child carrying that little toy may well find it snatched away by puppies of PAP which are sniffing around, for “any badge, symbol, set of colours, flags, advertisement, handbill, placard or posters as political propaganda” would be “seizable offences” during the cooling-off period. It is time for Men in White to prowl the streets and zap away any ripple of irregularity in the normalcy.

3) Conscience and Compassion of the People, not control by Government through Fear

But if there is one battle that the PAP is clearly losing this time, regardless of the results, it is the moral battle that has been waged by the opposition, even if one be so cynical as to dismiss it all as strategic rhetorics. Things simply can never be the same again, now that a floodgate of voices for the hitherto ignored segments of society has been opened in the stadiums and in the blogospheres of Facebook.

SDP candidate Vincent Wijeysingha has entreated the people to discard the fear that has silenced them for 52 years, tracing variations of Marxist conspiracy claims which have been made by the PAP government through the years. Standing for election as a fellow candidate now is Teo Soh Lung, one of 22 who were captured and put into prison without trial in 1987 under ISA; as ex-detainee and SDP member Vincent Cheng says at the rally, the ISA (Internal Security Act) is PAP’s tool to demolish the opposition.

(Important sidetrack: Singapore has been slated for its first ever Universal Periodic Review of human rights situation before the UN Human Rights Council, in Geneva on 6th May 2011, in a most interesting coincidence!  Human Rights Watch said on May 4th that UN member states should denounce Singapore’s severe restrictions on freedom of expression, association, and assembly, and reject Singapore’s claims of “specific national circumstances”. But it seems Singapore may just let some African countries, or other nations with less affinity to human rights record, line up as speakers during working group session on this day, so that the day can still be kept as ‘cool ‘ as possible…)

Meantime, voters in Singapore have also been urged by WP candidate Dr Chen Show Mao to use their vote as the true secret weapon, telling them that the vote should not be cast for one’s own sake but for others’ too – a viewpoint which George Yeo attempts to counter by telling people to vote out of ‘enlightened self interest’. Tan Jee Say reassures voters that their votes are secret, professing to voting for the opposition himself while still a civil servant, and getting promoted anyway.

Perhaps conscience alone may never carry enough force of persuasion, but people are longing for change in their own self-interest too. NSP candidate Nicole Seah shares that she used to get doors slammed in her face during walkabouts and would be told “I cannot talk to you in public, if not the police will catch me”. But things have changed in the past few weeks and people are coming up to an opposition party instead of the other way round. Perhaps, as her colleague Tony Tan says, the government has created ‘two Singapores’, with the high-income earners on one hand including ministers with bonuses pegged to GDP growth, and the middle- to low-income earners on the other who have to struggle with rising costs of living and little savings.

One may easily cite reports here that Singapore has the second highest income gap among 42 nations with “high human development” according to the United Nations, with a Gini coeffcient at 0.472 in 2010, on a scale starting from zero, with one as maximum inequality. While Singapore has the highest concentration of millionaires in the world at 11.4 per cent of the population (now how many of these would be the ‘new citizens’?), the bottom 10 per cent has a household monthly income of $1,400.

This is not to say that we are looking at a revolution in the mode of the storming at the Bastille in 1789, even though the PAP, with the aid of mainstream media (which is expected to inundate one’s ears on Cooling-off Day), may be creating the impression that everything will just collapse once opposition gets in. Actually, this is akin to suggesting that there is no foolproof system in place, that the system can only run by people with superpowers as denoted by an emblem of lightning on their uniforms. It is no surprise then that they are doing all they can to portray opposition party candidates as a bunch of transgressing mutants, before the electorate decides these are in fact are the heroic X-men who are coming to rescue them.

The ambition of the opposition, as articulated by WP Low Thia Khiang, is honestly rather humble and rational: to be a co-driver in the Parliament. Dr Yaacob Ibrahim asks how one can be a co-driver if one has been missing all these years, but there is already a quick retort to that: the applicants have been missing all these decades, because they are either jailed, sued into bankruptcy, or forced into exile. More importantly, there is a pragmatic answer to that too: the opposition now has a licence that comes complete not merely based on academic qualification but also with some comprehensive manifesto and even a shadow budget attached. They are coming not to bring dissolution, but solutions.

Indeed, a slogan word like ‘compassion’ should not be dismissed now as nothing but an utopian idea. It can be an industy on its own to create jobs, for it is time we consider diversifying in our economy for the benefits of society. Take healthcare for instance. SDP incidentally has a high-calibre team of medical professionals who are guiding its healthcare plan, among them one Prof Tambyah of NUH who has also spoken at a lunchtime rally and remarked that in Singapore, you can die but you cannot afford to fall sick. Now why not expand healthcare budget, build more polyclinics, increase healthcare personnel and make health insurance universal?

As a rebuttal of Low’s co-driver analogy, K. Shanmugam has likened PAP to a pilot, who should have full authority and cannot be slapped by the co-pilot. It is a rather cunning analogy if one reads into it: for only selected few can have the licence and privilege to fly the plane, and furthermore, this conjures an imagination among the paranoid passengers, that anybody other than the pilot who wants the steer the plane another way may just be a hijacker. Well, actually in real life, one may want to worry instead about an SIA pilot who refuses to divert the flight even when a passenger has heart attack! In fact, one should bring the analogy down to a level more primitive than that of a bus. The PAP belongs perhaps to an age without any co-driver, and is whipping horses reckless to speed a chariot away, without regard for safety; worse, to prevent the horses from getting distracted by any good view, it is putting blinkers on their eyes. So we can continue to slave all our lives, say, without ever considering any alternative to the current government-controlled system of housing prices?

The PAP should in fact grow out of the dark ages of witch-hunting already, of conducting character assassination on opposition candidates. Surely you know something is wrong with a country when a tabloid newspaper and the government fearmongers seem to be on the same frequency, playing the same tune. While the bogeyman in previous election was Dr James Gomez, this time round we have two notable cases of sloppy if not ill-intentioned reporting by The New Paper, one that aids Dr Vivian Balakrishnan in questioning if Dr Vincent Wijeysingha has a hidden ‘gay’ agenda, and then one that misleadingly describes Dr Chee Soon Juan as a ‘loose cannon’ trying to lead a march.

These are just the usual lame attempts to brand the opposition as mad men transgressing from the accepted norm of a one-party system. It is typical of an uptight nanny state treating citizens as little children, telling them that the world outside is dirty and dangerous; now when you think of the latest PAP slogan ‘clean hands’ in connection with this, it just sounds very anal. Perhaps somebody is just jealous of newcomers that are selling Singaporeans a new product called ‘democracy’? Well, the voters should regret now for not speculating in this product much earlier. There is fresh air in the world outside!

Indeed it is time we ‘deconstruct’ the government of Singapore, in a postmodern sense of the word. (er, I must pay tribute here to our law minister who has evidently used the word as something negative to ‘fundamental pillars’ of the government, without first checking its meaning on Wikipedia) We must stop thinking of everything in terms of black and white when it comes to party politics, we must not exclude any proposal from opposition parties just because they are not in a privileged position to speak, we must not consider any deviation from the status quo as being mad. We must stop making the assumption as some PAP defenders in the internet do, that the current system has been working for decades and hence there is no need to retrofit. Surely a brand name will have its shelf life too.

PAP’s latest young man (‘hao seh kia’) Desmond Choo makes another warped analogy: “If your wife is unable to cook, there’s no point. You must choose a wife who is able to do things for you.” Well, he is clearly too old-school and sexist to win the hearts of our female voters in this 21st-century society then, and he is mixing up family and work in the first place. Maybe his family is PAP, but work is work for the country. By the way, is that utilitarian mindset the typical elite mentality? If there are citizens in our country who are not productive enough for the economy, the only way is for them to be left behind and replaced?

As the campaign approaches a final showdown on Polling Day, we see the PAP doing all it can to win the votes. It is already behaving like a kind of a shape-shifter, sometimes imitating the opposition’s voice to win voters’ trust, sometimes reverting to the usual form as authority. It would warn us that we need to cast the right vote, or we will live to repent and pay for it (pay and pay forever?). Suddenly, it would also turn all smiley and become our ‘newbie’ friend on Facebook. Despite a 5-year term, it would say sorry only 3 days before polling and maybe it will beg us to recall some good old times in the last half a century. And who knows, just before we go to the ballots, it may also perform a stunt as our neighbourhood policeman, warning us of an emergency in the form of a terrorist attack, or it may start gossiping again like our busybody aunty nextdoor, spreading rumours on some opposition members?

All we need to do anyway is stay calm and not be perturbed, for it is all vanity. As long as we know what we stand for, we can transcend this most surreal of space-time in our national history, we can lift ourselves and dodge any bullet coming our way, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. There are many others among the electorate who may waver, but it is important to stay firm. Just stay cool, we can indeed be a gracious society during Cooling-off. Do not think of attack if you hate the guts of the incumbents, just thank them for participating in this election and tell them the next better players are here too. Don’t get mad, just get even – as in a more even representation of voices in the government. The country still needs to get a lot of dialogues going after the big day. Fear should not return to haunt us.

GE102: ‘Aliens’ and the Singapore Matrix

Our uncle and our housewife aunty in the HDB are leaping with joy, they never imagined radio and television license fees can actually be scrapped and they are getting a refund for what they pay in this election year! They have always been so absorbed in soap opera because local news are more plastic and boring and they have lost touch with the bigger world out there, they don’t understand what it means by whatever changes in ‘economic’ or ‘demographic’ ‘structure’ that Singapore is going through. They just assume the elite technocrats have everything under control, they feel assured whenever they hear that thing called GDP is growing at a good figure (double-digit!), but whatever beyond that is rocket science to them and not their business.

Time to take the red pill without the sugarcoating and see a different reality of the Singapore matrix, beyond those sunny pictures on a tourism brochure. The great machinery of economy seems to keep running and running in the island nation, as there are always some major investment items thrown into the furnace to feed it (last year for example we had the YOG – do notice I am not using the word ‘burn’ here, I heard it’s very sensitive). The logic apparently is for foreigners to spend money here (just don’t ask the minister in MCYS about overspending). Therefore we had to mobilise all our school kids to welcome them.

But wait a minute, foreigners are not just invited to visit for a week or two, many seem to be staying for good – we have in fact 40% population of foreigners as of 2010, more than any other developed country in the world! (Compare Canada, Australia, New Zealand with around 22%, UK and US much lesser). They seem to be placed everywhere: you have bus-drivers from China who don’t speak a word of English, you also have doctors from China who need translators, and starting this year, New Zealand and Australian architects can register here while foreign lawyers can practise commercial law here. It looks as though Singapore is mutating into a G.O.A.T. – government-owned alien territory, while we all just gawk silently as sheep and lamb. What is happening? If economy is the reason, what is the logic or the plan?

2) Citizens as First Customers (not just an economy on full steam that leaves the masses behind)

That is where we may need opposition parties such as SDP to ask for judicious control of workers into the country; the shadow budget unveiled by Dr Vincent Wijeysingha includes a Singaporeans First Policy requiring businesses to demonstrate that skills are not available among Singaporeans before employing non-Singaporeans. In fact the very structure of the economy has also been called into question. The current government has adopted the manufacturing sector as an ‘engine of growth’ to be retained at 20 to 25% of the economy, but it is a sector deemed unsustainable in a paper by Tan Jee Say, the SDP candidate who used to work under DPM Goh.

Now MM Lee just said Singapore needs 900,000 foreign workers because they do construction and other heavy work that “Singaporeans are not willing to do” – but how exactly do these industries benefit us when Singaporeans are not employed? And are Singaporeans not willing to work as architects or lawyers? He cited the embracing of foreign talents as a “reason for the success of Silicon Valley where new ideas sprout up”… Now wait a minute, the logic is breaking up here, do we need foreign bus-drivers who are more innovative in driving and foreign lawyers who are more creative in interpreting the law? All I get is this beautiful picture painted of an old man planting a money tree for us all, in fact I have this picture that 40% of Singapore is being converted into a money tree farm with foreigners working on it, but somebody just tell me: What exactly do I get out of all this?

The engines of economy keep rumbling and trudging on in Singapore, but somehow people just seem to be left behind, thrown off down the tracks. Go read the account of this ex-NUS graduate who has called himself “a failed product of our meritocratic educational system”. Unlike lucky people in a ministry who get to work in air-conditioned offices with new ergonomic chairs, ‘career’ for people like him in the past decade has just felt as precarious as construction workers sitting in an open lorry on a bumpy road. Let’s understand it is not that we should fan hatred against foreigners, no, that is not the right direction to go. The issue with foreign workers or talents should indeed not be the “unfamiliarity with their diverse accents and habits”, as President Nathan cited, but how exactly have they “made our lives better”? Some historical or social contexts are simply missing when he said one should welcome foreigners and new citizens into one’s midst “as our ancestors were welcomed in days gone by”. (Maybe he was just addressing the Indian context, but imagine a dirty old Chinese man applying the same argument: he might divorce his wife or just take in a Chinese masseuse as mistress, then tell his son: “show some respect, don’t forget even your grandmother came from China!” Imagine the social problem when we are indiscriminate!)

It is not simply about the status of foreigners here. What touches a raw nerve will actually be the status of us all as citizens here. Say, do our men enjoy privileges as citizens for going through the army, or do we actually lose competitiveness in the job market as we have to do national service each year? Can we as citizens demand the right to work, or how about we demand the right not to work and just get unemployment benefits like in Europe? That is probably inconceivable of course, and what the opposition parties are asking for instead, is what MP Low Thia Khiang, party chief of WP, raised in the parliament in January: a minimum-wage policy. This is something which exists in more than 90% of all countries, even Malaysia is having a minimum wage model, yet PAP’s candidate Josephine Teo said that would make companies close shop and she is now again dismissing it and claiming Workfare schemes as a better alternative. Workfare has in fact been criticised elsewhere for lending itself to stigmatisation and exploitation. But eager to prevent minimum wage from being made an election issue, she now calls the issue ‘leng fan’ (cold rice).

Well I do hope PAP’s female voice Josephine Teo didn’t spend too much on her Mandarin coaching if she indeed hired some help from China just to impress the voters, for that word is not going to go down well with low-income families who find basic necessities like rice too expensive with 7% GST attached. By the way, it is really funny how that Channel News Asia report calls her the “labour movement’s Assistant Secretary-General”. Isn’t NTUC just the supermarket chain that make our neighbourhood provision shops close shop? Making our SMEs competitive?

Dear friends, time to tell your uncles and aunties: there are always other places to do shopping!

(to be continued)

GE101: Why Cynics should vote for Opposition

There should basically be two types of voters for the GE in Singapore now: those who know why they must vote for the opposition party, and those who will soon come to realise – hopefully before it is too late. (Of course that leaves out people who are one with the ruling party, but do you really count on them to make any change when they virtually function as one organism serving its own elite perspective?)

I shall not reach into the dark recesses of history to make my arguments here; I know there are a lot of people for whom concepts like ‘democracy’ sound too abstract and words like ‘injustice’ too disturbing for their tranquil mind to deal with. The arguments here will just be socio-economic and pragmatic, setting sight on the future, and I do hope they speak for themselves especially to our ‘Type 2′ fellowmen who may still be politically apathetic, fatalistic, defeatist and cynical.

For it is a question of whether the incumbent party actually has that secret formula to upturn the economic downturn that has plagued citizens of working age for an entire decade, or whether it is time to puncture that myth of our Asian economic miracle as something independent of global systems. It is a question of whether we are experiencing the upside or downside as an outpost for foreign talents from the middle empire or down under, and whether we are attaining Swiss standards or Russian standards of living. Ultimately: can the one-party system still be relied on to work magic for all strata of society?

The point here is not to convince anyone to cross a yes for an opposition party on the ballot paper as a pure act of protest – even though I would very much love to do that personally and I won’t stop anyone from doing it. Neither is it the point to hear the voices of your favourite opposition politicians venting the anger for you, the NCMP system already set aside a stage for such simulated democracy. Instead, we should see that electing candidates of opposition parties into the parliament is no longer a mindless gamble; it has now matured into a viable and urgently needed option to help push for alternative policies and ensure accountability in governance. And I shall summarise the virtues of a bigger fraction of opposition party representation into three C’s (I do hope the SDP will forgive me for stealing their idea of the capital C’s):

1) Competency and Accountability (not complacency and arrogance)

First of all, don’t ever let anyone tell you that all political parties are the same. That’s a lazy way of thinking that belongs to some belching old man in the coffeeshop who has seen the 50s and 60s and concluded that politics is necessarily dirty; he has seen two faces of PAP, and he finds it a norm that an election be a game of mudslinging, he no longer thinks about what is right, left or wrong.

Well, he is just about ready to nullify his vote to signify his withdrawal from humanity, but you who still treasure your meaningful life should be smart enough to know that you have to choose between the lesser of two evils. Anyone following current political debates now will not only see remarkable qualities in opposition party representatives and cogent arguments for alternative proposals from them, but also how the arguments by the PAP ministers for the status quo are looking increasingly lame.

Secondly, don’t ever trust any party that tells you they have an exclusive monopoly of talents and integrity. More crucially, be very wary when they start to conduct the vilest personality assassination at the slightest opportunity. This is a cheap but typical tactic to cloud the voters’ judgment and divert their attention from the real issues. We are not here to sieve for saints or holy men who can heal the sick by the touch of their hand, or martyrs who will die to save the world – if we were we should never have accepted PAP ministers who demand such ridiculous high pay and yet never take the blame for any negligence or oversight leading to flood, transport disaster or escape of terrorist.

We are voting in MPs who are competent individuals representing policies advocated by their party as a whole, because their party has not been empowered to push for policy changes till now. MM Lee is saying the PAP is fielding 24 new candidates of proven character, of high calibre and track record of performance. I would say we are sorry, we don’t know what your criteria and process of selection are, but your party has been given enough chance over the years yet it has demonstrated nothing but groupthink, and the last decade just never worked out well for us with a poor 1.1% real wage growth (and ‘resident’ unemployment rate has hovered between 4 and 5.9%). So take the hard truth that this is not Disneyland, we must be practical and not sentimental, we can’t watch the same cartoon over and over.

Meantime, it is notable how the opposition parties in Singapore have grown in sophistication and come to represent much more than just a voice of dissent. SDP has released a shadow budget calling for the development of ‘third sector’ industries, and eliminating ministerial costs by $30 million to put into more productive use, among other things like revamp of school education system, introducing counselors in schools, reducing fees for local students at tertiary level and so on. WP has proposed in its manifesto to peg the prices of new HDB flats to median incomes of households.

And with the introduction of candidates like Chen Show Mao who has advised China’s Agricultural Bank on some billion-dollars offering, the party’s call for voters to invest long-term in its party for a First World Parliament does not seem all that odd now. Finally, when it comes to the ‘poster-girl’ factor, NSP’s Nicole Seah is just winning her PAP’s counterpart hands down in conviction and eloquence. Shall we not take that as a sign? Not just our economics but also our politics ought to be competitive, it’s maybe high time that our complacent and arrogant PAP candidates be replaced by more hard-driving and hard-striving opposition party members?

(to be continued)

Talking Race and Religion: The Phantom Menace

Whatever its little detours may be, ultimately, the goal of racism is dominance. – Albert Memmi

‘Race’ is like an idea that simply finds it difficult to die. There are people who would attribute a good half of World War II to the neurosis and paranoia of one man, namely Hitler, but the most disturbing thing should be that the legacy of such obsession with race lives on long beyond him, mutating into different strands in the world – the model of a nation based exclusively on race (eg Israel), even the idea of race as a human gene pool to be maintained for superiority like in cattle breeding (eg Singapore). Somehow, a figure like this will always have his admirers, if only out of fascination for the seemingly unlimited power held by a single mortal being. There is probably also something admirable about the efficiency, even if it is efficiency that involves inequality and cruelty.

‘Clash of civilisations’ all over again

The latest variant on the idea of ‘race’ has been encapsulated last decade in the pseudo-scientific concept of the ‘clash of civilisations’, as coined by Samuel Huntington, and there is no need here to repeat the rhetorics stemming from 9/11 and the Iraq War once again ad nauseam, except to point out that by way of a half-baked concept like ‘civilisation’, the word ‘race’ tends to be conflated now with the word ‘religion’, as a new source of fear following the collapse of the communist ideology. Sadly, with the trends of migration today, there seems a heightened sense of ethnic or cultural differences that are reduced to such terms. Last year in Germany, Bundesbank (central bank) board member Thilo Sarrazin stirred controversy with the book Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab propagating his claim that Turkish and Arab immigrants are neither willing nor capable of integration. The last straw was when he was quoted invoking the old idea of ‘genes’ as something which makes Jews or Basques different from other people. He was expelled from the board of the Bundesbank and fellow members of Social Democratic Party even attempted proceedings to exclude him from the party.

A book with similar discourse on race and integration has now stirred some controversy in Singapore too. The problem is, the remarks have come from a man that the Prime Minister himself can depart from but is unable to remove from the cabinet (it’s an uniquely Singapore situation, let’s just say it would be an unfilial thing to do according to Confucian ethics). Former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (who holds the post of ‘minister mentor’ today even two decades after a 31-year tenure, something which ought to be the envy of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt now) has said in a new book entitled Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going: “I would say today, we can integrate all religions and races except Islam. I think the Muslims socially do not cause any trouble, but they are distinct and separate.”

He not only suggested that the Malay Muslim community in Singapore will have to be less strict in their practice of Islam in order to facilitate integration, but also opined that they will never catch up with other communities. Criticism on his comments came rather quickly from Malaysian leaders, who described him as a ‘racist militant fighter’, ‘a very senile old man’, or simply one with a mindset stuck in the 1960s, a period of prejudices and suspicions against Muslims; for a moment, it seemed like a repeat telecast of an old feud across the straits was threatening to air again. Then came reaction from local Malay Muslim groups slowly in the later part of the week. Apparently time was needed to deliberate, and one is well aware that on a serious national issue like ethnicity, it is not useful just being candid about it. The Association of Muslim Professionals (AMP) for one released a statement saying that MM Lee’s comments “have hurt the community and are potentially divisive”, and that fundamentally, “there is nothing wrong for any community in Singapore in being distinct, for it to carry out its religious practices, or in asserting its identity”. It added that it is “not mutually exclusive for a good Muslim to be a good Singaporean”, that in fact one would be duty bound by the religion to be one.

How many mistakes can you spot in this statement?

Clearly nobody from within the society so far has wanted ethnic differences to escalate into a ‘worst-case scenario’. The way forward is always to put the past of our grandfathers behind and focus on the reality now. But politics aside, it is imperative that the young generation of Singaporeans learn the right thing, not the wrong thing. Let us analyse carefully what is wrong with Lee’s comments here. First of all, the very word ‘race’ that we are all so used to seeing on our ICs: that comes from an outdated concept that was thought to be scientific back in the 19th century, what Darwin would even refer to as subspecies back then, and people were hence divided into racial categories of ‘Black’, ‘White’, ‘American Indian’ and ‘Asian or Pacific Islander’ for instance. Under racialist doctrines, it is believed that physical and moral characteristics are interdependent, or that physical differences determine cultural differences. It may be that some are now using ‘race’ as a shorthand for ethnicity or descent by linguistic differences, but the word still lends itself to abuse.

Secondly, ‘religions and races’ are mentioned in one breath here as if they are synonymous with each other, which is akin to the problematic grand theory of ‘clash of civilisations’. If one says that it is simply equivalent to the concept of ethnicity in the Singapore system, that will be another problem to point out. The artificial grouping of people into Chinese, Malay/Muslim, Indian for social services in the form of CDAC, Mendaki and Sinda simply leave people who are Indian Muslims, for instance, in an identity crisis.

Thirdly, the utterance that ‘all religions and races’ can integrate ‘except Islam’ sounds dangerously similar to Islamophobic speech in Europe. It is a sweeping statement that should never be thus formulated by a statesman, no matter what the context is that precedes or follows, unless it is intentionally calculated to promote fear and prejudice. And by the way, unlike in Europe, we are not discussing immigration policies here, we are talking about our own citizens here if we understand correctly.

Fourthly, a proposition like this conveniently leaves out other markers of people as individuals, such as language, education level or social class that may affect one’s behaviour. An English-speaking Peranakan Chinese with university education would behave very differently from a Teochew-speaking hawker. There are always many factors to consider. It is inappropriate, for instance, to even bring into question the loyalty of Malays as Singaporeans just because Mas Selamat had a hundred relatives or friends who might not have turned him staight to the police. We need to be precise as to whether the issue is ‘race’ or personal ties. If we see an entire Chinese family working in a same department, we may call it nepotism or guanxi, but we don’t say it is a racial issue.

Finally, where is the objective substantiation that Malay Muslims are not integrating unlike others? Before any stereotyping, we need a comprehensive social study with statistics to see how young people of different ethnicities choose friends, and whether inter-marriage indeed is impossible between Malays/Muslims and other ethnic groups, whereas Chinese, Indians/Hindus or Christians in contrast have little problem with marriage with a different community, and what are the other factors that may come into play. (If anybody asks for my observation, I would generalise that many Chinese girls here are more sombong than Malay girls and difficult to socialise with, but surely nobody has to take my word for it without further research.)

Food unfit for thought

The very notable example Lee cited from his own observation of Malays not integrating is that they tend to sit separately while eating in schools and universities so as not to be contaminated. He called this a ‘veil’ among people and his proposed solution for Malays’ integration was: “Be less strict on Islamic observances and say ‘Okay, I’ll eat with you.’ ” Now, the Chinese have the advantage of being relatively free from any religious precepts that will restrict them in eating anything from shark fin to frog legs. So why can’t a Chinese kid start by adjusting one’s diet for a meal and then invite a Malay friend to sit together, instead of brooding about being deemed unclean and feeling insecure all his life without ever making that step?

Interaction is always a two-way street. If we suspect Malays of prejudice based on this, then should we also jump into conclusion that a Chinese is racist just because he would avoid Indian Muslim food stalls, as he is not accustomed to the bau of anything on the menu other than prata and teh tarik? We have to reflect on that. One who complains of veils standing in the way should also think about removing the blinkers around his eyes. And if anybody wants to bring up the issue of tudung, we can talk about it. Do we want to adopt a Western brand of secularism like the French now even without adopting Western democracy wholesale, or do we still believe in a multiculturalism respecting the Asian values and religions of all communities, as the common people assume Singapore is about? If a Malay woman cannot find a job as receptionist even though she can speak English, Malay and Mandarin, do we insist it is her own fault for wearing a tudung? We need to reflect on that too. Telling Muslims to be ‘less strict on Islamic observances’ like this would only invite speculation and alarm. Does it imply all 24-hour coffeeshops here may soon have to sell beer like those restaurants in Beijing, and hire China girls in mini-skirts to serve the beer too?

It is indeed incomprehensible why the Malay Muslim community has to be singled out in this issue of ‘integration’ if they ‘socially do not cause any trouble’, whatever that means. If we are talking about recent issues of tolerance and respect among communitites here, we should in fact note that there was a church group that tried to take over a secular woman’s group, accusing it of being pro-lesbian or whatever, and there was a pastor who ridiculed members who were formerly Buddhist or Taoist. But can we generalise that into any statement about Christians in Singapore? That would have been unfair on our part to all the peace-loving Christians around us. Incidentally, I recall that there was a Malay mother who was at the Pink Dot event two years ago, wearing pink baju and pink tudung in support of her son. Guess she is ‘less strict’ as a mother.

Some members of the LGBT community in Singapore seem to be rejoicing at the moment just because MM Lee said he would still love his grandson even if he is gay, since he is ‘born that way’. I am sorry to interrupt the love and happiness but I think it is premature when legislation itself does not change, in fact it sounds like an old pretext that people at the top have no problem with it, but it is the ‘society’ that will not accept it. So let’s reserve the celebration until the day when lesbian couples are portrayed in a positive light in the state-monitored media, and one does not need to block out their faces as if they are a disgrace, the way some stores in America are shielding off three quarters of a magazine cover featuring Elton John and his adopted baby, just to ‘protect’ the family consumers.

What is multiculturalism?

Today, the word ‘multiculturalism’ is used around the world (ok, I know, we don’t actually use this word in Singapore) to refer generally to the recognition of cultural diversity which includes ethnic and religious minorities, minority nations and indigenous people. Some even include the rights of sexual minorities and the disabled under the term. Part of the challenge is not just a politics of recognition in terms of status, but also a politics of redistribution with regards to economic inequality.

If we seriously want ‘integration’ here (hopefully not ‘partial assimilation’), there is a lot to think about, not just enhancing youth programmes for inter-ethnic exchange, but also rethinking the paradigm of self-help or social service bodies divided along colour lines for instance. And how about SAP schools which are distinct and separate with their emphasis on Chinese language? Would that be a problem too? It is very tricky when you have different standards for different ethnic groups. When it comes to the ‘fact’ that the Malay Muslim community is distinct and separate, one says that they are not fitting in with the Singapore society at large, so they have to change their habits and mindset. But when it comes to a poll that says 90 per cent among Singaporeans accept a non-Chinese leader, one says it is not reliable, just utter nonsense, and in other words, the majority already has their mindset fixed, so the minorities have to accept it. Does one see the logic of the game here?

Curiously, Singapore also just saw a piece of news last week about Raffles Institution – a school equivalent to the Ivy League in political significance – taking on a new mission, to scout for poor but bright boys especially from the ethnic minorities. Should we read this as a hint that Singapore may one day have its own Obama? Perhaps some of those boys will aspire to that and try to change the system from within. Well to them one can only be obliged to say good luck. They will need to be trusted or the experience can turn into an infernal affair between two worlds.

Meanwhile, a piece of entertainment from Sentosa too: the Singapore authorites simulated a terror attack at an Integrated Resort, in an unprecedented large-scale exercise involving 400 resort staff and government officers. As a parcel exploded, three gunmen stormed into the Universal Studios theme park to open a fire. It was probably a good demonstration of how much Singapore’s national security is inspired by Hollywood movies. Do we hear anybody crying out ‘social defence!’ as part of the slogan of ‘total defence’?

Fear and bigotry are the path to the dark side. Build bridges, not dig trenches, we must. May the strength of peace be with us.