Recently in Politics Category

There’s a dichotomy when it comes to what we expect of our public servants. We expect them to be:

1. Competent

   I mean, no one wants stupid public servants. On an operation level, we’d like our public servants to serve us with an acceptable level of efficiency and get the job done. On a strategic level, we’d like the bigwigs to be smarter than most of us and make decisions that will help us all. So our economy will stay healthy, our children will have a bright future, we’ll all find great paying jobs that we love, we can stay out without fear of being mugged and our reservist stints don’t include real war.

2. An average Joe

   Our public servants should be one of us. They shouldn’t be sitting on an ivory tower, aloof and cold. They shouldn’t be seen driving expensive sports cars. Most of all, they should be making a decent living at best - no over the top salaries that’ll alienate them from the struggles the rest of us face on a day to day. God forbid those that make it to the top of the public sector be paid a salary similar to those at the top of the private sector.

I’ll be honest here. If I have the chops to make it to the top of the public sector, I’ll probably want to buy a sports car. A Tesla Roadster. Wouldn’t you? If a public servant ought to emphatise with the common man, isn’t he allowed to fulfill the common dreams?

The passing of the opposition political figure J.B. Jeyaratnam last week has stirred a lot of emotion in the Singapore blogosphere. Hundreds of Singaporeans turned up at his funeral. Alex Au even thinks Jeya could end up being Singapore’s own Che.

I must admit I do not know much of the man. Like most, I have seen him peddling his booklets outside shopping malls, where curious tourists would stop to browse and paranoid Singaporeans would avoid him. I know he paid an immense price for his efforts to champion individual freedom and human rights in Singapore; and that the powers that be have been extremely heavy-handed in meting out disproportionate (from my opinion at least) sentences.

I suspect most Singaporeans, like me, do not know what Jeya stood for. What exactly did he oppose?

Crowd reactions aren’t always about the issues. Like fans of the musical Les Misérables, the reason for the fight is lost in the emotion of the revolution. Support always sways to the underdog.

It doesn’t help that even in the time of mourning, little was done to reconcile the man to his homeland. Goliath chose to pen a letter of condolence which for all purposes and intents manifested itself as the utterance of a true Philistine. The Straits Times chose to label him as being oblivious to his irrelevance to Singaporeans. The bashing of a man now deceased leaves an extremely bad taste in our mouths.

It is obvious that Jeya’s work is far from irrelevant. Jeya’s fight for individual freedom was perhaps ahead of his time, but what he stood for then is now increasingly relevant to the Singapore people.

Perhaps it was necessary to concentrate our efforts on maintaining harmony and economic progress during the formative years of our nation, but it is high time we took a good look at why the “building of a democratic society based on justice and equality” should no longer be neglected in order to “achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation”. (Quotes from the Singapore Pledge).

Amazing stuff you have to watch. Putting it up here because it’s been taken down at Youtube.

US captures Bin Laden’s office boy, promotes him to 3rd in command, and pats themselves on the back.