The cold cold working world

Exit small shallow coves of youth,
The wild waves of untamed sea await.
Adiue homely hills of the low land
My heart longs for you here in the north.

If internship were a window into the working word, what a bleak view it is to witness. Gone are the doting (if doddering) professors hopeless attached to their academic soap boxes. A long good bye, to your fellow students compatriots in skiving. Farewell to those long pregnant and lazy afternoons gazing across the botanical gardens.

O the passing of youth, so terrible a tragedy to befall us all.

It’s been so long

I sit here staring blankly at the empty screen, fingures poised to start typing. There are few things more daunting than the white, blank page. It’s potential limitless and yet bound to your own mortal competence. And then I realize, that it has been so long since I actually wrote something because i wanted or felt like it. Often I write, because i think it necessary. Writing becomes a means to a purpose, and not the end in itself. I want to write simply because I want to write. Not to change the world or to finish an assignment, but simple to see words crawl across the white page. A spidery script forever changing the blank expanse.

The Joke that is Citizen Journalism

Or rather, citizen reporting, since as of late everything since to involves citizens reporting on each other. Just yesterday I was taking the train home, when a young Malay man opposite me decided to squat down and sit on the floor. To my quite abject horror, my first reaction was to whip out my camera and send the picture of this unfortunate person to the Straits Times for people to “tut tut” over under the accusing headline of “WHERE ARE OUR COURTEOUS COMMUTERS.”

I am horrified, because I have become victim to an especially damning sort of social conditioning. Stand there in the moving train, I could have done several things. First, the option was always there to ignore him. Second, I could tell him to stand up. And third, of course, I could send his picture to STOMP, providing our news-starved newspapers with a tidbit to publish. The choices beget the question: if I could not bother to tell him to stop, was he really bothering me in the first place?

With all the spin peeled back, citizen journalism as heralded by the likes of STOMP is nothing more that a perpetuation of a school yard mentality to “tell the teacher.” Think of all the major stories “broke” by citizen blogs. A large amount of them involve people telling on other people. The current H1N1 pendamic is no different. Internet users hide behind their sactuaries of anominity and freely criticise potential carriers as being irresponsible. The lable of irresponsibility carries as much irony as does the term citizen journalism.

The Smoking Democracy

Today, the United States of America House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to give the government unprecedented control over the smoking industry. Officials can now limited the amount of nicotine in cigarettes, prohibit sale, and of course, mandate compulsory warning signs on each packet.

To any Singaporean, this kind of stuff is old hat. Possibly in the near future, the establishment will gratingly remind us of this, trumpeting our island as yet again being a world leader that even the decadent liberals of the Western world eventually follow. Considering briefly that in Singapore, smokers are subjected to being taxed out of their nose, bombarded with ceaseless campaigns of blacked brains and lungs and most iconic, being confined to a small yellow box with others of their ilk. We easily bring all this to mind, and yet seldom give pause to brood a while perhaps, on the question of “Why?”

The short answer is that in a democratic society, the majority has spoken (as has the house of representatives in the USA), and so sets down the law. If you are satisfied with this answer, then democracy for you is as simple and as crude as mob rule. Over the course of its development, countless politicians have warned against the degeneration of democracy into the tyranny of the majority. So the answer that “because it’s the popular opinion” is woefully insufficient.

Of course, the majority element cannot be downplayed, but the development of the modern democracy has led to a multitude of institutions that specifically guard against simple pure majority rule. A great deal has been said about Human Rights and Constitutionality of the acts of the government generally, but in Singapore there seems to be too little being said on the subject of smoking. For while the people affected are smokers, the principle goes beyond the mere pack a day.

Without a doubt, smoking is a dangerous hobby to indulge it. It creates numerous, documented health problems to both the person and the people around him. But then again, smoking isn’t unique in this regard. A large portion of the way we live involves danger and risk. Drinking, gambling, just driving on the roads, or even eating a particular kind of food, can all be little nails into the coffin of our lives. So, if we are indeed going to herd smokers like animals into yellow boxes, depict them as decaying zombies on TV and so on, we better be asking the right questions along the way. Are these actions giving due regard to the rights of smokers? How much government intervention do we want into dictating what is the “good life”? Is this good life even possible, or do we just chose which way we are going to die?

For the crucial issue is: what happens to smoking can happing to anything and everything else. Setting the precedent for the easy incrusion by the government into our private lives simple paves the way for future meddelling as the governement sees fit. Even if the government retains popular support, democracy by then would have truly gone up in smoke.

Old Dead People

Why is it that people have the vague notion that grandparents once deceased transcend from the slightly senile, child spanking and bitterly racist people that they are into benevolent spirits that watch over the house? My grandmother was possibly one of the most unashamed white supremacists this side of the planet, the fact that she herself was Chinese was a mere minor detail that never bothered her fascination with the superior Aryan race. Looking back, it was probably this fascination that led her to marry my grandfather, a really quite dashing Eurasian sailor who after several years and 4 children promptly divorced her (in true Eurasian, skirt chasing fashion) for someone presumably younger and better looking. I’ve met this other clan of the family only on two occasions, these being the funerals of my grandfather and grandmother.

Shortly after both these events, my family being the rumor mongering suspicion loving move that it is, began to attribute just about every thing in the house to “Nanny looking over us.” This is particularly chilling, since knowing Nanny she’d probably be gleefully tipping over glasses, spilling soup and banging pots rather than doing any actual “looking over.”