Sunday, July 15, 2012

Silly Idea: Fabrications About the PAP

I am tired of this Facebook group: Fabrications About the PAP. I typed the following and as I was about to press enter, I changed my mind and decided to record it here instead. Here was what I wrote:

These First World nations have gone overboard and they can't afford or sustain it. We have gone the other extreme as some like Dr. Yeoh Lam Keong had explained. I come here you bash the opposition. I go to the opposition they ridicule the PAP. In my view both sides tend to misread or over read each other. People have no time to read and understand every argument. You and the opposition will not help to build trust but cause the majority of us in the middle to be bewildered and eventually become cynical, worse distrusting. Monitor your readership. If they start dropping off you have your early warning sign. If they grow instead, good for you. You have done something right. 

If I were a PAP leader I would be more strategic about how to use this group. You would want to gain support from those sitting on the fence like myself than just provide a rallying point for the converted. Why you guys want to do politics more and more like the Anglo Saxons, I don't understand. It is simply not clever. We go down this road, I am afraid we will inherit all the negatives and very few if any of the positives. Just like this apocrypha story around George Bernard Shaw,

Once a lovely and famous actress suggested that she and Shaw should have a child together. "Think of it!" she said, "With your brains and my body, what a wonder it would be." Shaw thought for a moment and replied, "Yes, but what if it had my body and your brains?"

We in Singapore do not drink from the river that gave the West their erstwhile great civilization. Unlike many Asian societies we drink from many rivers. We need to find our own way and we are wasting precious time imitating what is not suitable to our culture. As we build ourselves into a global city we face the greatest risk of getting lost and losing it all. This government forgot to dig deep even as we reach outward to the world. Tall trees need deep and wide roots if they were not to fall.

2 comments:

  1. Tks, good points, great article.

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  2. It is a good platform to provide a more balance view in blogosphere. Don't you think we need that?

    ReplyDelete