grousings

Any country that holds legitimate elections between several political parties is labelled a democracy. At least that is my (layman’s) view.

But don’t you think that if all the parties involved practiced legitimate politics and enacted better policies and then held legitimate, genuine elections that would be a better definition of democracy?

Too much to ask of human nature I guess.

This somewhat lucid argument materialized in my dream. It came about in the midst of the most wonderful black-forest cake dream. I don’t know how and I don’t know why.

I’m too tired to take this post into anything more than what it actually is: an ode to my superior ability to churn out utter rubbish.

The above was written in early April and it’s already the 30^th. Time flies I tell you.

I will now proceed to trying to redeem this post and drag it to the vicinity of something that might, hopefully, be considered remotely interesting.

It never ceases to amaze me how inane Singaporean published news is. Everywhere I look there are headlines screaming out something profound like ‘8 in 10 people in Singapore have acne’ and ‘Five Dead Pigeons Found Lying at bottom of HDB.’

Even though I cringe every time I read something like this, I completely understand it. Any small country with a stable economy and a stable government will have a problem keeping a publication alive if they only published something that was actually worth reading or had some impact on people’s lives.

As usual I don’t have a point with regards to this but I just wanted to whine about Singaporean media. My real grouse is that I’m not usually a reader of the news; it has never interested me all that much so when I actually do pick up the paper I am expectant. I expect to read something that will educate me and inform me of the world out there. I also expect to see well written stories that will help me add to my vocabulary arsenal. It doesn’t happen and that is why I get so annoyed because in my personal opinion, I hate the writing style of the national newspaper. You might think I’m talking out of my ass (refrain from getting mental images, oops, too late) but this is just how I feel.

Another problem I have is that some stories are intentionally written in a way so as to wreak the public with a sense of fear. For example, if someone gets murdered in Singapore, after all the objective details are reported in the news, inevitably, a life lesson/warning will be monotonously doled out.

If a maid kills her employer, everything goes mad in Singapore. The tabloids squeeze the life out of it, Channel 5 or 8 makes a television special on it, television news executives heave a sigh of relief because now they have something to say and the government asks for some air time so that they can warn their peoples of danger invading their homes. And what’s more, all this will be said in an overly objective manner so as to showcase its remarkable ability to be fair but unfortunately for them and us, it becomes an exercise in handing down damnation and judgments on the overall and largely harmless and hardworking population of foreign maids (with explicit and specific focus on the word foreign).

What the Singapore government needs to realize is that people are quite intelligent to take away a lesson or two from something that is objectively reported in the papers. Wouldn’t it be common sense to be wary of anyone other than your family if they were living in your house? There needs to be a balance in between wanting to come across as a caring government and one that comes across as being too preachy and controlling.

Nobody wants to live in a society that is pervaded by fear. What Singapore lacks (gains) with a low rate of crime it more than makes up with the fear of being attacked, robbed, raped and murdered. In small doses, the preachy tones of the media and the government are good but if there’s too much of it, some of the joy that we get from casually walking down the street is lost.