Surviving in Singapore: Riding the Lightning

We went to watch "Survivor Singapore" on Thursday.

They took a lot of cheap shots. It was very funny. They fired off a lot of pop-culture references and sexual innuendo. There was a lot of Singlish and the usual mish-mash "rojak" result of cross-cultural assimilation.

Was there anything deeper? Oh, plenty.

It was all about 1 thing: Dysfunctions

The dysfunctional teenager: devoid of all survival abilities, self-centred, self-indulging, self doubting and pampered or (alternatively) suppressed beyond belief. Many ideas they make are innovative but superficially ridiculous, and are thereafter subjected to the suppression fire of the school and the society, but only after the plan goes wrong. Have a desire to speak out but have no voice.

The dysfunctional parents: Outwardly believing that they want the best for their children, instead they either pamper or oppress their children, giving them only what they need materially, and neglecting the emotional needs and the psyche of their chidren. And when the children go wrong, they push the blame on the children for not having accepted their well meaning actions, and call their children "rebellious", hypocritically sidelining their own hand in the alienation they now receive from their childern.

The dysfunctional school: Expouses innovative thinking and the classic "thinking out of the box", but yet they do not do anything to guide this innovative thinking, regarding the ideas given as "ludicrous" and "dangerous", and then, instead of helping them to formulate their ideas into workable ones, they dismiss them, ignore, and then, once trouble brews, they condemn them and like authority does when misused, dismiss their own part in their own problem.

The dysfunctional media: While the media should stand impartially on the sidelines and report the news as it really is, it has now been corrupted and thoroughly intermingled with the corporate world, and posts the news that will bring the most people to the screen or to the sheets of newspaper before them. This has given rise to sensationalism, the race for sponsors, viewership, subscription and ultimately to the popularity of the tabloid.

The dysfunctional society: Best of all, the society works like that too, and condones such things to happen. We take our racial equality for granted. We think that money is everything, and even if we don't, we sometimes act as though we do. The worst thing: NO ONE OWES US A LIVING.

(If you don't know that yet, or don't want to know, I'd sooner take a Blutsauger and shove it between your shoulderblades than acknowledge your existence.)

This, I already knew. At least, people would express it in their plays, but ah, that is probably just part of the reflective nature of the society looking back on its fallen nature. The anegnorisis sets in, and regret follows inadvertently. Will there be a carthartic purging? Ah, I say, not while this world lasts. Not while this world lasts.

"We will soon forget the innocence of the now, and be immersed in the deluge, drowned in the tumult of the real world and its stark realities. Only too soon will we know that we are all sufferers in a suffering world, mourners in a mourning world, and the dying in a dying one. Whence will we turn? How shall we question? And who will answer? Who will answer? Who will answer?"

(Perhaps I love making up my own lines too much. This one I took from a popular song of some decades back, and took an idea from one of Voltaire's writings. It has always amused me to think about the pallbearers of God, and how miserably they have failed, and how deeply they despaired in their pride and in their wisdom. O confounded men!)


"For the weakness of God is stronger than man, and the foolishness of God is wiser than man...May the light prevail."

(A lonely amen)