perfect for talking boring stuff.
like politics.
Actually i don't think much about the goverment stuff. I know when I was still dating James (gasp, it's been 5 years!), I told one of his friends in a round about way how I loved Singapore. I talked about how people depended on the government too much. Every damn thing gets them running to the govt. If you really think they're lousy, then prove it by standing up and doing something.
Easier said than done yeah. That's me, at age 19. But at least I've been always a positive person.
5 years later, today, this woman ding dongs at my door enthusiastically, informing us a PAP member is going to visit us.
HAR? HA?
Then I turned to my granny and asked, how come the other 3 years 11 months never see them visit us?
Just as they arrived at my gate, I had an urgent sms to send for work related reasons. They rang the bell, knocked the door, machiam scared we dun want to welcome them. Por nervously stood by my bedroom door, and kept asking me why I didn't want to go outside.
After a long day at work, this was really the ideal way to end the day.
So we stood at the gate, waiting for the minister guy to come by. His ka kia came by first and said: Later you can tell the ministers your problems.
HAR? HA?
Second later, this malay minister came and started speaking in chinese, asking us to support him and vote for him. They were holding cards with the names of the people living in each household they will visit.
I had no problem to share with him. Maybe I could have asked him the same problem i gave my students all week:
There is an aeroplane flying 2-3km above you. A package drops out. How far must you walk to retrieve the package.
If the minister can give me an answer, should I be more convinced of his abilities?
Anyway, I had no problems to tell him. I don't know him. Besides being relatively impressed that he can speak decent mandarin, I still dont know him. Don't know this thoughts, his plans, his ideas, his goals or his passion.
Passion for people would be quite ideal.
I told my mum later that its really a bad sign if the people dun want to tell you their problems. In their eyes (actually its my eyes), these men in white dun have the ability to solve our problems. Not that we never tried. We've queued up at GRC offices waiting for long time to have them listen to us speak to them. At the end of the day, they tell us they can't solve the problem. But they can refer us to a specialist/lawyer who might be able to advise us. Seriously, wtf.
There was this time I was in problem briefing meeting, where we were discussing about a problem, and the objective is to help the students understand that we can overturn authority, if we do it with rationale. This colleague was telling us he helps ministers write letters, and "you'll be surprised, but once a minister writes a letter on behalf of a resident, the effect is usually quite positive" (definitely not exact words, but quite along that line). I frowned and thought
1. Most companies/people would definitely respond positively to a minsiters letter, lor
2. Does it have to take a minister's letter for anything to happen around here?
Track back to 2004. Minister Mr Tan and wife came to US and visited us NUS students on the program. Apparantly when this program was launched, he was quite convinced it'd fail. It didn't and he had a lot of good feedback from the rest of us. I felt quite privilleged to sit at the same table as the couple, and I was sitting next to the wife. When Mr Tan was making his rounds at the other tables, I asked Mrs Tan, what is the government doing about the retrenchment problem?
She gave me some answer which stopped me from asking any further. I mean seriously, Sheryl, do you expect her to say something more than "Oh the goverment had re-training programs……blah blah blah" I remember feeling disappointed and slowly indifferent. After my question, one of juniors happily announced to Mrs Tan that every time a minister visited his camp, he and his camp mates would be very happy. She asks why, and he said cos the food will usually be very good! And she was expressing her shock, and something about the ministers thinking its the real stuff the soliders get, as they see when they visit. By the way, the restaurant we were at was a singaporean one, and that was the best time and taste i ever got from it.
Maybe that was and will be the last time I will ask someone from our current government how to solve a prblem. A little unfair of me to base my judgment on a wife's point of view, though. But i did.
Having said that, I haven't even had the opportunity to even go close to an opposition member. Do they really spend all their time attacking the current party in power? Don't look at me strangely, I really don't know politics. It'll be real swell if we could understand them, instead of reading about them and their lawsuits.
What's the role of the government? I really have no idea. How does our government fare relative to other governments? I mean, I think in general its been good. We don't have the problems of other countries. But why are we generally so unhappy about so many things? Why is it we can find so many things to complain about? Are we just hard to please? Will it help if our ministers came from the heartlands? Is the government just supposed to prevent wars, provide education, health and all the (expensive) public goods?
If you were asked to imagine your ideal government party, what would they be like? My mind's a blank.
