A Patriot’s Story: We Must Take Back Our Country!
Hello Everyone!
Most of us, being Internet savvy and reading in English, are younger and more educated. We know how to vote wisely. But we are not enough. 66.6% of our country does not vote wisely. They are either ill-informed or they hold the ruling party to the wrong standards when voting.
More worryingly, this 66.6% may have increased since the last election. We have gained many new citizens in our country, so 66.6% may be 75% now.
I appeal to all patriots. For this upcoming election, we need to convince two major groups to vote more wisely. We need to talk to them. They are the Elderly Voters (our Elders) and New Citizens.
Understand Our History before trying to persuade our Elders
Younger voters tend to forget the events that forged Singapore as an independent nation. It is important to remember our history, because it determines how our Elders vote.
PAP was not the party it is today. PAP was the party that smart people should vote for, the party that opposed racial politics in Malaysia.
Many early PAP ministers were wise and hardworking. Back then a certain un-nameable person had not yet ‘persuaded’ his colleagues to ‘retire’, so PAP had not yet morphed into its modern form. It still included many people who had abilities to contribute.
The meritocratic (not mere-ly-autocratic) policies of the early PAP were vital towards nation building. As younger voters, we must not forget this history when trying to persuade our elders to vote wisely.
We must convince our Elders that we are not immature kids who (as Jack Neo has satirized), are stupid or know nothing. We know PAP was benevolent in the past. We know it did good things and achieved much and had caring ministers. We acknowledge that the PAP cells in our young national body were good for growing the body.
Younger voters may dismiss cancer out of hand. But I am old enough to go for cancer screening. Let me remind all that normal cells can turn into malignant cancerous cells as we age. We cannot keep voting for the same cells if these cells have turned cancerous. We must convince our Elders about this.
Persuade our Elders to vote with the Right Expectations
We must explain to our Elders that they must change with the times. They have a right to expect first world standards in the first class country that they worked to build. They must hold the ruling party to the standards of first world countries. If they don’t want to compare with Western countries, at least they must compare with other first-world Asian lands like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Please explain to your Elders that it is wrong to compare Singapore with Zimbabwe or North Korea or 1930s China or the Philippines or Indonesia. We are not illiterate like the average 1930s Chinese peasant, and we work more hours than the Indonesians. If our Elders insist on making these inappropriate comparisons, then anyone with a PSLE cert should be considered ‘talent’ since basic literacy was respected in 1930s China.
Since we pay more than the average daily wage in Bangladesh to take the MRT to work, we have a right to expect MRT to be far above Bangladeshi super-crowded standards.
Since we pay our top bureaucrats hundreds of times as much as a top Indonesian civil servant, we have a right to expect hundreds of times the quality. (Being corruption free or competent alone doesn’t warrant hundreds of times the salary. Otherwise we should also pay hundreds of times the salary to bus drivers just to drive safely.)
The average citizen will pay the government and its GLCs thousands of dollars in combined GST, electricity bills, conservancy charges and water bills every year. That’s more than what the average Filipino earns during the same period. We have a right to expect our government to do more than the Filipino government.
When our Elders were young, it was common for Chinese people to work like slaves till they dropped dead. Not having a social safety net was acceptable. Letting people starve in the streets or die because they lacked money for healthcare was acceptable. Kowtowing to Angmoh foreign talents walking the streets was acceptable. Having a sense of inferiority as Chinese/ Asian, being the sick man of Asia, was acceptable.
Today, these standards are not acceptable.
Our elders tolerated blood-sucking bedbugs and hair lice in their daily lives. We can no longer tolerate parasites sucking our blood with every ERP gantry. We must persuade our Elders of this fact.
Tell New Citizens that we welcome them – and to vote responsibly
We should not reject or insult new citizens. We should try to understand them and communicate with them. To understand how new citizens feel, let me tell you my personal story.
My parents came to Singapore at independence. They didn’t want to live under a regime that discriminated on the basis of race. Singapore offered more Hope. Not money (Singapore did not even have a currency of its own), not jobs (back then, what jobs? We did not even have ‘New Towns’ to live in), not food (many people thought we would literally starve to death; back then the price of rice was very worrying to many immigrants). HOPE!
We are patriotic people. When Marine Parade was built, my parents proudly took me to see those impressive new buildings. It took several trips on SBS buses. I got to collect multiple bus tickets.
(Remember, those good old days, frens n bruders? SBS still employed bus conductors and was un-airconded but relatively un-crowded? Now these ex-conductors have become karang guni ah peks barely making a living.)
At Marine Parade I was afraid to go near those buildings because I thought they might collapse on me. My parents pushed me forward to show that Government was Good, it built Quality things that won’t collapse on you.
When I served NS, we did not yet have the manpower shortages that the 2-child policy would create. I was labeled non-combat fit. I actually got MO to upgrade me because I wanted to serve my country.
Don’t call me stupid for doing NS as a chong sua chow private. That was in the good old 80s. When they broadcast 雾锁南洋 (The Awakening), 五脚基 (The Five Foot Way) and that kind of stuff which we were so proud of. When nearly all Sinkies wanted to get tickets for the NDP at the Kallang Stadium. Before the internet started revealing things behind this façade of perfection.
My most patriotic friends/ contemporaries are those who have parents born abroad. For their parents, Singapore wasn’t about ‘claiming FT and acting big’ or ‘taking jobs from locals’. It was about putting down roots in a land where all citizens had equal rights. The Singapore of the 1960s-1980s.
Over the years, what has happened? One by one – the so-called Marxist Conspiracy, right to appeal to the Privy Council abolished, constitutional changes pushed through, outrageous rulings by CJ Yong Pung How, ex-SAF personnel appointed to civilian institutions in dual career tracks, President Ong Teng Chong’s death and the hasty cremation without autopsy, Cheng San election with blank ballots inside the box, Goh Chok Tong’s threats against voters who vote against him, Singnet’s secret computer scanning fiasco in the 1990s… one by one the dominos came tumbling. Revealing that our country is not a first-world modern democracy.
Many new immigrants don’t know our history. They read SPH or see the slick image that Singapore broadcasts abroad with its Singapore job fairs and SIA adverts. Some savvy PRC/ PR students do use us as a free scholarship-stepping stone; some smart angmohs marry Sinkies but retain their original citizenships. But new immigrants who renounced their countries to take on Singapore citizenship basically got suckered into the same bad deal we now have.
Don’t blame these new Sinkies or direct your anger at them. Tell them the truth so that they may learn, and join our side. They are victims too. We need to band together and vote correctly.
No major international news source dares to say the truth about us. Bloomberg, Newsweek, Time, the Economist, the International Herald Tribune, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Asian Wall Street Journal – any and all respected news sources have been sued successfully for libel already. Why blame hapless new citizens who were not cunning or sneaky enough to see through the SPH-controlled press? Don’t create divisions between us and them; it only serves the ruling party’s interests.
We are Singapore, all of us.
Some Sinkies think you must be from an old family and trace your roots back to Tan Tock Seng to belong here. I disagree. Singapore belongs to all of us. We are a nation of immigrants.
Including ‘old’ immigrants who came here to flee China after Mao Zedong took over.
Including ‘new’ immigrants who came right after Singapore became independent.
Including new immigrants who got their ICs earlier this month.
Let’s not create divisions between old, ‘old’, new and ‘new’. Everyone who is not a cancerous cell has a stake in our continued unity and prosperity.
Everyone has a stake in removing the parasites and cancers in our national body.
Everyone has a stake in redistributing our resources away from the parasites and cancerous cells.
We must remove the cancer from our national body which has infected our leadership. We must remove the parasites that running dogs have infected our society with.
I repeat: we must take back our country. Not from new immigrants, not from PRCs or Indians on work permits. But from the cancer within us.
If you were around in the 70s, you should remember our main food scares then. Not imported PRC stuff, but undercooked local cockles - ‘hum’, often infected with parasites carried in feces from the (then) filthy Singapore river. We of that generation have eaten so much undercooked ‘hum’ from the S*** Propagating House and S*** Broadcasting Center (Talk Cock Singsong, if you are too young to remember SBC) that now we are filled with parasites as a nation. We must be rid of parasite-carrying hum. No more hum, real or symbolic, in our daily kway png, murtabak or mee siam. Most important-Lee, we must be rid of our cancer First before it tarries too Long inside us and destroys our nation.
For the upcoming election, vote wisely! And do your best to persuade our Elders and the New Citizens to do likewise!
V.S.
