2/27/2011
This is home, truly…
Is Singapore a home or a hotel? The traditional understanding of a home is a place where one grows up and has many fond memories of, old places, faces, smell and a lot of stories to feel nostalgic about. It is about belonging, a familiar place to touch base.
The features of modern living and being Singaporeans today are about change. Everything is changing, from the infrastructure and road maps to the faces of people on the street, the odour and the sight and sound, never the same before.
We have people moving in and out of the island, citizens become non citizens, non citizens become citizens. We move homes like changing clothes. All the memories of childhood were wiped away for development and progress.
The moving and changing even goes down to being a part of a place or constituency. Today part of Hougang, tomorrow part of East Coast, then become single wards, then GRCs. Today serve by this MP, tomorrow by another.
With all the continuous changes in our lives, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, can we really feel that this is home? No wonder they are saying that as a nation, we are still a work in progress, starting all over again and again. Our roots have very few things to anchor on. Our friends were always new, our neighbours new, our MPs also new. We are less than 50 years old, and our accumulated past have already been wiped away by economic and progress.
This is home, truly? Work in progress?
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9 comments:
"confirmation bias" is the natural human tendency to look for "evidence" to support a pre-conceived belief -- in this case trying to "fit" data/ info into the "traditional" definitions.
To me "home" suggests deep emotional attachments -- roots, tradition, linage, family history, integration of body, mind, spirit (and "soul" to those who believe in that concept) into a geographical territory along with its inhabitants and culture.
Since I don't have any of that "deep meaningful stuff" with Singapore to me it is a HOTEL -- and dare I say one the world's finest.
Please don't keep singing this tune. What if we import another 3m new citizens and they bought up half of the properties, how different is it to selling our land/properties away?
To me it is not different from selling Christmas Island or selling Alaska. For a few dollars, the land and properties gone forever, unless they are on short leases.
If the soul can be sold or pawned, what the heck is the country when You can buy your many private lands elsewhere.
Where the fuck do we find patriotic leaders in the World now when those despots, tyrants and dictators kept their loots in FOREIGN BANKS IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES?
patriot
redbean:
> Please don't keep singing this tune. <
I'm sorry if you don't like the song. I'm merely sharing my point of view, so suck it up and deal with it ;-) (or not)
> What if we import another 3m new citizens <
New citizens were never "imported" -- they came on their own free will.
And you can rest assured, as long as the policy of "open borders" applies, and it will, you can expect 10-15 million population within a few decades.
A hotel starts to hum when there's lots of people making a happening party.
I fully support the future!
Matilah, anyone who is a guest of this hotel will say the same stuff like you. I too will encourage the stupid Singaporeans to be warm and courteous to the hotel guests and make them feel hospitable.
The hotel guests can enjoy everything they want without responsibility, and scoot off whenever they want. They can even pee on the Singaporeans and suka suka tell them off. The silly Singaporeans would have to clean up the shit they left behind.
Balls lah. The hotel guest come with money or productivity... i.e. they contribute "value" to the local economy.
No hotel guests ==> chia lat for the xenophobic yokel-locals. They'll end up as Singapore's "rednecks" -- isolated, ignorant and fucking their relatives (in-breeding).
Beyond finance and economics: having hotel guests -- especially sexually active ones -- strengthens the gene pool and makes "biologically better" human beings.
Matilah, my post, Like a prostitute, is my reply to your hotel country. I like every country to be a hotel too.
But as a citizen, the citizens must be a little selfish to take care of their own kind, just like a family taking care of their own blood. When there is no family and no country, what is there left?
Oh yes, prostitutes.
You conflate the ideas of "family" and "country", and that messes up the argument completely.
In a family the individuals tend to know each other on a personal basis and therefore to take care or to reject a member has more "meaning".
Not so in a cuntry. But you talk of cuntry...what cuntry? The state stole the cuntry years ago. I used to have a cuntry...but I refuse to have anything to do with the state. So I withdrew my "support" and now it is strictly business: A Hotel and I am a guest -- I pay, I buy. When I have "had enough" I leave -- no duties or further obligations on my part.
That is much better "protection" for me (and family) -- the selfish individual -- that anything your romantic notion of "citizenship" can offer.
In a country, the people know quite a lot of people around them, their neighbours, their schoolmates, NS mates, their work mates, their relations and the relations of their relations, and friends of their friends. Over the years, the network of relationship only grows and grows.
The rapid changes have eroded this process of relationship building. Many relationships were broken and new ones have to be made again and again and many are thin and fragile.
We got a 40+ years of headstart but mostly broken down. The roots are uprooted and replanted every now and then. It must have a lot of social costs.
The other danger is the breaking down of the family unit and kinship. One child or no child family will have its consequences. The olds, many are going to spend their old years in loneliness. Good thing? I am not too sure.
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