Generation aXed - a thought provoking article

The above title of an article by Cheong Suk Wai in the Sunday Times is a very interesting article to read. She started by talking about this guy, I presumed must be a man, telling her that the country or the world will be a better place without the labourers or labourer's genes. The crux of this guy's theory is that good genes produce good genes. A very familiar line of thought. Then she cheekily quoted this Prof Wald who was asked to donate his sperm to the sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners so that the world will have more good genes. And the professor's reply was that his Nobel Prize genes came from a poor tailor. His own genes only produced two guitarists. Reading the article at face value is funny and a bit of an anti climax. But read in between the lines and the messages and all its nuances come through quite clearly. And there are many messages to be discovered. This is a real treasure hunt. One of the key message can be traced from these quotes: 'Now I don't know what he made of me, but my stunned silence throughout his tirade did not mean I agreed with it.' This is very Singaporean. Many audacious things happened recently, and all we hear is silence. 'But time and tribulation have taught me that the best response to such head scratching pronouncements is to say what you know in the very pit of your gut to be right and real.' What Suk Wai was saying is that you must be polite and say nicely to him but not to offend him or make him think that he is really an idiot. So her way of replying to the guy is this: 'What would competition be like when there are only good genes to compete against other good genes?' She did not talk back or demonstrate violently. She did not tell him he was wrong. She just asked a few plain questions. Hmmm, very similar to what I have been doing all these while.