These Upstanding Citizens of Singapore
In today's Straits Times, two young Singaporeans have written about bad manners among their peers, and reading them, you would think they were well-meaning, fairly educated and highly observant retirees.
You know, the kind who religiously reads ST and watches the evening news every day and constantly laments at how poorly the next generation has grown up. The kind whose wisdom you vaguely acknowledge but even more wisely dismiss as unhelpful to today's world?
It turns out one writer is a NS boy and the other reads history at NUS. So why they talk like that? They're preachy, they don't argue a case logically as much as they exhort a value judgment. Their entire discourse is one of do this; do that; you mustn't be like this; and that should be the way.
So these are the progenies of our Confucius society; the fruit of our many years of determined proselytizing of good Asian values? I only have one thing to say: SCARY!
Thank god we are a small country, because if we were a super power, our black-and-white mindset could well make us the next Meiji era Japan or Auschwitz-era Germany.
You know, the kind who religiously reads ST and watches the evening news every day and constantly laments at how poorly the next generation has grown up. The kind whose wisdom you vaguely acknowledge but even more wisely dismiss as unhelpful to today's world?
It turns out one writer is a NS boy and the other reads history at NUS. So why they talk like that? They're preachy, they don't argue a case logically as much as they exhort a value judgment. Their entire discourse is one of do this; do that; you mustn't be like this; and that should be the way.
So these are the progenies of our Confucius society; the fruit of our many years of determined proselytizing of good Asian values? I only have one thing to say: SCARY!
Thank god we are a small country, because if we were a super power, our black-and-white mindset could well make us the next Meiji era Japan or Auschwitz-era Germany.