2002-04-05 - 1:30 p.m.
So my friend Qian got a call from a journalist asking for a response to Tan Soo Khoon’s speech. That newly-arrived rabble rouser, finally out of KY’s aging shadow, turns the nomenclature of semi-retirement – from the Lifetime Achievement accolades showered on him recently, you’d think ex-Speaker’s anagrammatic for ex-MP, or ex-it – to firmly insistent criticism. Ala a talking skull (he’s very bald) with backbone. Journalist: 500 words on why young people are cynical about the political process.
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Because our allowances cannot pay for potential lawsuits.
Because there are only four official skin tones, while we see shades that remind us of our Technicolour world. Colour is mutable, if we don’t like it, we dye it.
Because when we want to replace the history we don’t believe in – the National Museum multi-mediated revolving stage of The Singapore Story, sans Lim Chin Siong, sans Chia Thye Poh, sans Teo Poh Lung – with one from our painfully selective memories, they tell us they’ll have to tear it down, i.e., the National Library, the Bras Basah park of weekend footballs and candlelit marches, the mangled Chinatown.
Because if I say the f-word too often in a play, its restricted viewing, but if I reverse the middle letters and stamped it all over my shirts, it’s a foreign brand.
Because we know rule by law doesn’t not guarantee due process, trial, or justice, or fair play. There is still the ISA.
Because too many are legalists, who wants to expand the scope of law. We want fewer laws, and greater civic spaces.
Because we recognize the proliferation of politics beyond the partisan - the politics of the coffee shops, the trade unions, the student organizations, the charities, the religions, and the inevitably international connections between feminists, writers, artists, sexual and racial minorities, musicians, and countless other politics that would take priority over the national.
Because, as one Minister have said before, if we don’t like it, we can just leave.
Because we want to retire gently and gracefully, not selling books and newspapers on the street.
Because we haven’t been perfect people. We are not virgins, have copied each other’s homework, have paid less than appropriate fare on the buses. We smoked, we drank, we swear, we dance with a pill in our mouths while overseas on our scholarships. We do not want to wake up to find that our boss has taken us to court for miscalculated taxi fares that amounts to a few dollars.
Because behind the bemoaning of the lack of younger entrants to politics lies another hidden lamentation: the lack of younger candidates to PAP.
Because the political authors we read are Ginsberg, Rich, Nadar, Gutierrez, Foucault, Joni Mitchell not Lee Kuan Yew, Clement Chow, Confucius, or Han Fei Tzu.
Because we want to avoid the trap of tokenism that enables those in power to say they have done enough to woo this demographic, when I may not speak for the young, just as a Chinese may not speak best for the Chinese, and all others, likewise.
Because beneath the glossy poster veneer of Disneyland harmony, we see racial and sexual inequality in the structures of our society, in our armies, in our schools, in our ministries, in the neatly partitioned self-help groups.
Because we have created other spaces for dialogue: in our bedrooms, in our courtyards, in our emails, on the Internet.
Because some days I can in 4 words say what I did in 500: I care too much.
