Bring on the Hammer!
Now I don’t know what really constitutes “explicitly political”, so if the following post is deemed unsavoury by the powers-that-be, simply inform me via email at rock_of_god@yahoo.co.uk and I will gamely take it down. Disclaimer aside, here goes.
It’s time for Singapore to go to the polls again and I for one, am extremely grateful for the opportunity to vote. At the last polls in 2001 I was not eligible (being under 21 then), but if I had been, I imagine I would be rather miffed that I wouldn’t have voted anyway. The last time my family voted was in 1991, when we were still within Bedok GRC. Today, it’s been absorbed into East Coast GRC, which apparently includes Tekong and Ubin as well, go figure.
But I disgress. The point is this, thanks to the aspirations of a new breed of Workers’ Party members, almost 120,000 voters from East Coast GRC will be heading to the polls next Saturday, and I am one of them.
Now, admittedly, my family isn’t very politically inclined, in the sense that we don’t attend political rallies or meet the MPs at their walkabouts or the like. This is probably because at home, my dad is already the die-hard PAP supporter, who believes that no one else can achieve the standards set by Lee Kuan Yew and his successors. My mother, while less outspoken, innately believes that a walkover in a constituency saves everyone the trouble because “only those who want to vote for the opposition will complain”. I’ve yet to sound out my siblings.
Anyway, I count myself among those voters (a majority of whom are presumably from the post-independence generation) who campaign on grounds of ideology and not simply about the bread-and-butter issues. I believe the concept of democracy in Singapore is an ideal that few people care about - and this is because the voting system is severely skewed. It is a concept that several opposition members, notably Dr Chee Soon Juan, have been ranting on about. That is why I am glad that the PAP was not returned to power immediately on Nomination Day, because that will just prove the point.
No doubt, the PAP will return to power come Polling Day, but more importantly (and Mr Lee Hsien Loong himself has stressed this) it is the kind of Government that Singaporeans will vote in that matters. Forget the bread-and-butter issues for a week and prove to the electorate that their vote matters. Am I going to vote because I want a more balanced Government, with a healthy opposition presence? Or am I going to vote because my MPs have initiated yet another sequence of upgrading works - now giving us TWO lifts that service every floor, instead of just one.
Allow me to digress a little more and point out the whole irony in the situation. We have Singaporeans over in a certain SMC that do not have a single lift that operates on every floor of their flat… and yet here in Bedok we’re getting two lifts that go to every floor? Ridiculous. The whole concept of a carrot-and-stick election is abhorrent and I’m hoping that enough people in Bedok will see beyond the tons of carrots that they’re force-feeding us, and vote for a lawyer who has seen exactly what happens at the grassroots level and cannot stomach it.
Let’s do away with the carrots, let’s risk the stick… and bring on The Hammer.
