I feel very disturbed at the naivete and one track mindedness of which our government and their whole train of civil servants in waiting seem to be unfortunately endowed with. Even as I type, resources are being focused on organizing talks to deal with maintaining healthy relationships with your children, managing your rebellious teenagers and how to save your marriage etc, just to name a few.
Do they serious think talks can solve these deep rooted problems? I would think that even intensive workshops might not have a 100% of achieving a quantitative level of success, much less talks!
Naive, simplistic and detached from the man on the street. Eerily similar to the malady that pragues every PAP elite.
It brings to mind what YB Lee said about the quality of our ruling political party’s candidate. Because of the very method they were pampered into office, they do not have the fighting spirit of some of our notable Opposition members, being Ms Sylvia Lee and Mr Low Thia Khiang being stellar examples. I have never been moved by any of the speeches given by the PAP delegates. On the contrary, I find myself being disgusted and even outraged at the flawed logic and appalling stance taken in some of the latest PAP speeches, once of which is the recent rally speech by none other than our Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong.
Just to put forth one example on why I was so disgusted and outraged (just one, so that you do not get too depressed as I did…) :
One point I gleaned from the rally speech I linked above, was that, gasp, we (yes; you, you and you, and also me of course) are to be blamed for the population crisis that we are facing now. Last year, we were short of 14,000 babies! All 14,000 of us out there are to be blamed for not doing our national duty! Shame on us!
But bear in mind, it is today in present times that we are short of 14,000 to maintain the 4 million population. It would be logically sound to make the deduction that the said 14,000 babies should have been born like, 25 - 30 years ago? No?
But what was the government policy and stance back then? Was it not the STOP AT TWO campaign and as usual, they abused their political power and punished heretics who chose to have more than two? I use the term heretics because our government seem to think they are God.
Then why now in present times, it became OUR fault?
You screwed the macro economics, stop the finger pointing at the citizens.
And what is that stupid nonsense about not poking fun at our political leaders? Else we lose our respect for them?
Please…… tell me, how do you lose something you do not have in the first place?
***
Touching again on the quality (or lack thereof) of our PAP candidates: one word comes to mind.
Dough.
Soft, easily malleable. Even crumbles easily if not properly prepared.
And they are never properly prepared. How to be, if you have your work all cut out for you and success guaranteed? Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) are how these nambly pamblies (NP) ride on the coat tails of existing political powerhouses into power. In each GRC, a political heavyweight in placed nicely like a pawn piece, and is mainly there to hold the hands of these aforementioned NPs, oops I beg your pardon, MPs (Minister of Parliament). Success is handed to them on a plate.
It could also be because that these chosen ones are literally just that. Chosen. Hand-picked from the elite (perhaps for their “teachability”), they were invited to serve the nation, and I reiterate I use this term very very loosely. Very often, they had to to be persuaded into position, what with the numerous “tea invitations” and lured with the ministerial salary celery dangled in front of them.
See, if they have to be lured with an obscene salary, guaranteed success, and never having to fight every step of the way to prove your passion and conviction, the dough will be well on the way to the oven to be churned out as nice uniformly cut cookies.
***
Speaking of Singapore’s ministerial salary scale, our Minister Mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, openly admitted that our obscenely high salary scale for ministers serves its purposes of both eliminating the possibility of any corruption (note: that to him, it should be monetary compensation, and not a strong sense of integrity that should eradicate corruption) and to be on par with the private sector so as to persuade these chosen people to move from their comfort in the private sector to that of serving the people humbly. What a sacrifice on their part!
To me, this argument is severely skewed in terms of logic and reason. Moreover, where do we draw the line between blatant corruption and cronyism otherwise euphemistically known as “nurturing a business relationship”? Also known in layman terms as “you scratch my back and I scratch yours?”
How about the wives of the ministers who run private businesses and obstentiously ride on the political power of their husbands to surge forward? Are there any checks in place to stem that in the bud? No. Not only do they not have adequate policies in place to check such potential abuse, our ministers proudly proclaim that they do not require constitutional checks to ensure a balance of the political/ sociological quotient as ‘Within the PAP itself, there’s a self-checking system’.
The arrogance of monopoly is never surprising. In addition to feeding the citizens with regular government (read:PAP) slanted propaganda based on their long term strategy of creating a conditioned nation who will not be independent to think and analyze, and who will be lead by a government-controlled media to arrive at pre-determined decisions of which of course, the government approves, they are telling us now subtly (or not so subtly) that we, the citizens do not require an Opposition. They, of course, are too honest, as “honesty is one of their core values” to require an Opposition that they would spend “too much time fixing”. Do the comments in quotes sound disturbingly familiar?
Uttered from the very lips of our very own Prime Minister and the various other party jesters.
Remember the fiasco of the son-in-law insurance from Khaw Boon Wan? And many more gaffes here…
You see now why I am so unimpressed with the ruling party? Elite…. my ass.
