esperanza

That's the Esperanza, the Greenpeace ship that docked in Sydney two weeks ago. J and I hopped onto the ferry and cruised over the harbour as well as one of the most beautiful Sydney afternoons to another side, just to have a chance to hop onto the ship and have a tour around. People tend to shy way from Greenpeace because whenever this name appears, images of violent, crazed protestors come to mind. And it's true, Greenpeace can get aggressive (but never violent), and their members are wildly passionate people who care greatly for the environment. You may not agree with some of their tactics and beliefs, but you can't quite say you don't care about our haywire environment and dying planet. At least someone is doing something about it.

I'm tempted to bring in Chee Soon Juan here, for there're interesting parallels. Through skillful use of words and manipulation of phrases and perspectives, the Singaporean propaganda (i.e. Straits Times etc.) so successfully demonised Chee Soon Juan that whenever that name comes up, one immediately think of a raving madman. One almost never remember this was a man who was a university lecturer. Yet all our notions and perceptions of university lecturers - measured tones, eloquent sentences, brilliant minds - don't fall onto our visual imaging of Chee. Why? Have we ever heard him rave, bark, shout? Yes, perhaps, through the paraphrases and skewed reportage from the media, but never in person. Because in fact, Chee has never raved - he's not a madman that we have come to think he is. Have we ever heard him speak at Hong Lim Park, or logged onto Youtube for videos of his speeches and interviews and protests, or read his side of the story on his SDP website? No. Because the media has done the reporting for us. Because we don't need to form our own opinions. Because we don't have a mind of our own. Because ... it's better not to think about it, lest we become another Dr Chee (If only we were half as eloquent and smart and brave). Why are we so afraid of being a Dr Chee? Because we'll lose our jobs, we'll get sued and bankrupted, and have no more money to show off to our neighbours, friends, and relatives. Because deep down inside we know we're nowhere as eloquent, smart, and courageous as Chee. Because deep down inside, we don't want to find out why we are so timid and mediocre. Because we know that if we do, we'll be stripped as naked as the naked emperor.

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One of the biggest reasons why I'll never bring up my child in Singapore is I can never bear to teach him the moral values of truth and honesty. To adhere to these two values in Singapore would be to lead a life of misery, poverty, and incarceration. Truth and honesty gives way to money and power for more money and more power.

Having personally gone through the education system first as a student (it almost destroyed me), and much later as a teacher (I almost destroyed it), I've come to see it as a system that destroys dreams and life and that churns out mindless bots. We end up with kids who ace exams because they can cram, and we dump the rest who can't ace and who can't cram, and either way, we end up with kids who can't speak, can't write, and can't think.

We say we're bilingual but we aren't fluent enough to converse in either language. And when you do, your friends laugh at you, as if you were lolling off a foreign language. We say we're an educated workforce but we can't see beyond the As and Bs and Cs on our empty diplomas. We say we value intelligence, yet can't see past the school from where we graduated and the swanky job title on our name cards. We falsely equate intelligence with qualification, though qualification does not an education make, and intelligence is more than a string of As in Math and Science. We say we're an entrepreneurial country but we need to teach creativity to a people whose creative impulses were snuffed out in their stifled childhood. We say we're best in this and that, but all we do is to copy the world and build it newer, bigger, flashier. We say that without the PAP in government, Singapore would perish, yet at the same time, we pride ourselves in having an astonishingly brilliant and first-rate civil service. We are obsessed with labels and categories and can't see beyond the apparent contradictions and shades of grey. As Oscar Wilde starkly put it for us: we know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. We have forgotten that the most valuable things are also priceless ones. But we don't want priceless ones, we want expensive ones, and preferably more than one in different colours, models, and versions.

We're a country blessed with lots of sunshine, yet life is one big monotone with days of black and white. Singapore can be so much better a country, more intelligent, more gracious, more compassionate, more mature, and happier. Perhaps, also less of a sick joke. But the people don't want to be so. They simply think that any otherwise, Singapore would die, and that is if they even think at all.

It is such people and such thoughts that create today's Singapore - prosperous, but ruined.

When kids walk out of their schoolgates for the last time, no longer a kid, the world before them, what will happen to those wide-eyed innocence and easy laughter? Must they lose them, and lose them so quickly?