If your kid tells you he hopes you’ll buy him a better computer to help him with his school work, would you give him a slap and tell him to shut up?
If your kid tells you his ambition is to be a doctor, would you exhort him to get real and aim to be a security guard instead?
Goh Chok Tong has just chided Singaporeans for complaining too much about overcrowded trains and the lack of carpark spaces and public housing.
He said on Saturday these were problems created by Singapore’s success, and urged the nation to look at them in context.
“I want to put these challenges into perspective with the overall needs of our society,” he said.
He took it upon himself to remind Singaporeans that there are still some poor people, those who are disabled and those who need help.
Yeah? So?
We were told to have aspirations, that we must expect the best. We have been brainwashed to believe that this is a meritocracy, that cream rises to the top, that our brightest and the best run our government and the civil service, that they deserve the obscene salaries they receive, that losers leave for places like Australia and New Zealand and that it is the true blue, patriotic Singaporeans who stay to bust our asses but now we are being rebuked for having exacting standards?
Yes there are still poor people, and they are being helped and they’ve helped themselves too. Yes there are the disabled, and there are others who need help, but what has that got to do with our (not unreasonable) expectations that the government we voted in should be of the people and for the people?
So because there are poor and disabled people and people who need help we should all suppress our expectations?
How can we be told off for expecting anything less when all our lives we were been conditioned to aim for the highest, and the best?
Shall we all lower our expectations then? Shall we let our ministers – the crème de la crème of our country – sleep, let our society decay, let urban rot start, shall we send home those mainland Chinese whom we hired to play table tennis for us? Shall we tell ourselves “let’s not expect too much, let’s settle for second best”? Sure, let’s put everything in context, sure let’s put these challenges into perspective. Be my guest. Knock yourself out. But don’t tell me to consider myself lucky because trains here are less overcrowded than those in Tokyo.
With blockhead politicians talking through their asses, and occasionally treating us like doormats or retards with zero IQ, we will forever be disabled and crippled – er, metaphorically of course, which I suppose may be way too difficult for some people to even begin to try to understand.