Blank Doll speaks.

Damn, pity I was away in Paris when this whole thing happened. How shall I put it? I'm not as good with words as Miss. Wee nor as, well, experienced in the real world as Mr. Wee. Nonetheless, I am fuming over the issue and since I have used the word 'fuming', this is going to be an unreasonable (not necessarily unreasoned though it will most probably be the case) biased rant on my part. I do not intend to be 'responsible' since if I am not wrong- what was it people also wanted from the government?- oh right, freedom. Alas, I am also 18 like Miss. Wee, actually, not even 18 since Indochine refuses to hand over the bloody Mimosa and I have to make do with mineral water.

Oh, I am also not a debator and really, the Hegelian dialetic so often linked with reason and logic does not lend itself to unreasonable, childish ranting so bear with me if I do not do the two hand thing since Mr. Wee and his fellow friends have already given one hand and Miss. Wee the other.

Let's deal with the 'you're the government, you deal with it' slant first. Miss. Wee disagrees and Mr. Wee thinks that yes, the government should have a role to play in protecting the people from the evil forces of competition, from the uncertainties of tomorrow, from our suddenly fragile ricebowls (ignoring the fact of course that Mr. Wee actually has a ricebowl but we of course do not thank the government for such a given thing). Now, clearly reasonable people will be able to read also that the government should protect us from income inequality, from class divisions, from social equity.

First, the issue on government. The same people call for, oh right, freedom of press, civil freedom, increased citizen participation and that the government cede the political ground over to the people. In a boom, we all want freedom, it's like the 18 year olds moving out of their parents' house. So we demand that Singapore be a, oh this is my favourite, a Western style liberal democracy. Ignoring the fact that this also means you take care of yourself, that the government should not even be intervening in your lives, much less care about whether uncertainty is good or bad, they want freedom AND a government that deals with the vagaries of life. What they really want, though they will not say this hiding as they are behind their bleeding heart grievances and logical argument about social contracts, is a Western style Welfarist state where they may go cradle-to-grave crippled with the comforting arms of the government holding on to them. Choose, either a government that lets you do your own thing even if that means you screw up once in a while, or a government that takes care of you and then for crying out loud, do as you're told.

Second, the issue here is that government should do something about uncertainty. Mr. Wee apparently thinks that the government can and should do something about it, ignoring the fact that Singapore does not happen to be a superpower and that Singapore built her very fortune on uncertainty. Let us assume that the government does have a role to play in regulating income equalities in our country for now even if I do not agree with it. This is a separate issue from the government insuring your future and it is unacceptable to obscure the horizon by mixing them both together. What Mr. Wee wants the government to do now is something, anything, to make sure that our ricebowls stay the way they are come what may. How does our government do that? How can it possible contemplate doing that? He mentions the brilliance of our fellow neighbours. Well, he should have realized that they were there all along. Do we not dismiss their worth? Do we, as Singaporeans, not delude ourselves into thinking that because we have been more successful than them that surely, we are better than them? How can our government then guarantee iron ricebowls when even Mr. Wee has seen for himself the competition we face? Miss. Wee may have been particularly unsympathetic but this is the reality and our government has tried to do something about it, even if it means even more uncertainty in the future. At this point, I would like Mr. Wee to take a look at France. France is another country worried about its future (all developed nations do at one point or another, fair enough that Mr. Wee gave voice and a face to this underlying current in our society). The government protects its industries, the government gives them minimum wages, the government restricts immigration, the government spends so much on its present security it forgets about investing in the future. Well, France has an unemployment rate of nearly 10%, it's growth is absymal and in thirty years time, could possibly see itself pushed out of the world's top ten economies. France is a huge nation with a vast bank of past wealth conserved- Singapore is not and cannot afford to cosset its citizens because if it does, there may not be a future.

All right, no stupid dialetic but I can see where Mr. Wee is coming from. He is old (actually 35 is not old, Mme Chanel began her business anew at the age of 70) and has children to feed and cannot be certain of where he will live in his old age (a fine notion indeed since uncertainty of the future could include uncertainty about future filial piety). I will concede that his generation has it tough what with most of them not having the required qualification to compete with his younger, more upbeat competitors. Nonetheless, he does have a job and it feeds him well enough I think if he may spend his time blogging and not out in the city slogging his life away in the hope of earning enough money to buy food. Nevermind that he could very well have been a subordinate clerk working in Indonesia while someone else blogs about how terribly competent these Singaporeans have become if the government had been anything less than spectacular in the formative years of Singapore's history. Since I am also a teenager, I am allowed to bring in personal examples (if General Paper allows it, then blogging certainly does). My mother has only her O levels and they aren't even very good O level grades yet she has slogged very hard and today earns a more than decent income. The truth is, mediocrity in our society is very much the consequence of choice more than circumstances. You choose to lament in your comfortable mid-managerial position with time to blog while my mother is out all hours of the day working her arse off without even the time to properly learn how to use the damn computer. So perhaps Miss. Wee was also justified in saying what she did though certainly in a less passionate tone since we seem so particularly fond of crying foul in a group when a single person speaks a little too loudly.

And I never did like taxi drivers anyway with their penchant for voting for the opposition regardless of what the government has done and their conspiracist theories about Mrs. Lee and the evil Temasek Holding. The one thing they certainly are not complaining about is the taxi fare hike though even that I am sure, will have some grist for their mill.

On to the next issue then shall we? This concerns all the tutting and booing by people over what Miss. Wee has said. What was it about youth empowerment that even bloggers like Mr. Wang supports? Oh right, that youth should be less apathetic and do something about society. I would like to think that Miss. Wee was not being apathetic about society because she is achieving so much more with her actions than her words. She is doing superbly well in school and will one day contribute to society through her merit and virtue as a tax paying citizen of Singapore. She has but stated her views as a youth, that Singaporeans should not blame the government for every little thing, that they should not at once demand that the government help them and then demand that the government leave them alone. She was however, branded an elitist, the horrid end result of Singapore's meritocratic education system, a horrible snob far removed from Singaporean society. If you have read her blog in its entirety, you will know that Miss. Wee has seen the despair of poverty in India. She has great dreams to do more than walk the Singaporean path of excellence which she could undoubtedly do very well. I would think that if it had been some poor man from Ang Mo Kio who works two different jobs a day to feed his family of four, one of which in NUS now on scholarship while the other one still a teenager who needs tuition to catch up with work in school because he has to help out at home (mother died) and then still another child in primary school, then Miss. Wee would not have been so callous, so unpitying in her remarks. You call her a snob but pause and think. She directed her comments not at the poorest of society, not at the silent downtrodden people at the end of the social hierarchy, but one at the middle of it who cannot move beyond the average and who resents the possibility that even that might be taken from him and for that, I think she was in the right. Do not complain about your future when those at the very bottom struggle in silence because that is precisely what your brilliant counterparts in other countries did while you mused over the prices of condominiums and wondered when to buy a car so as to evade the COE hike.

Miss. Wee may have been a minority among youth today but she works her arse off and she is good at it. I cannot say the same for the rest of the youth population who cannot grasp the fact that we are a meritocratic society and it is ability that matters. Please do not even try to make this a debate about the different streams and institutions. You can do your best and be in ITE or JC or Poly and if it is the best of your ability, then you have been rewarded so let us not try to obscure the current issue. The people who boo her and who shout her down would like her voice to be silenced, well Mr. Wang, where are you now to defend a voice of youth? Will you now shut her up having encouraged youth to speak out on society today? Or did all of you expect us to parrot your cries for freedom and equality?

Next issue then shall we? Let us talk about the future of youth today. Were Mr. Wee in his twenties, his complaints would be completely moot. You do well at your studies, you get to come to Raffles, you get your scholarship, the government identifies you as talent, the gateway to the Ivy League empowers you, MNCs choose you, what have to moan about the uncertainties of the future. On the other hand, you choose to skip school, to stay outside loitering shopping malls, to not put in your best, to sleep in class, to be irresponsible for your future, then I am glad you did what you did because Singapore cannot survive on Ivy Leaguers, who will sweep our floors and uphold our reputation as a Garden City? This is just a little something reserved for young people who would like to grouse about the uncertainties of their future. It's your own fault, deal with it.

This is a really long post so I shall sort of end it off with a little rant about our darling newspaper. I no longer read the Straits Times for a number of reasons. The fact that it does not even have the decency to be a competent propagandic mouthpiece is one. Its complete ineptitude at being the, get this, Fourth Estate, another. The cowardice by which it must occasionally aim a covert hit at the government it does not dare to stand up to just so it may earn some brownie points with Freedom House the final straw. Oh wait, did I mention the annoying tone journalists take as well as the more than occasional English error that has given to the world the horrible spawn called Singapore Standard English that is the fount of all my little insecurities? If I want to check whether have I used a certain word correctly, I have to go to the Economist or the IHT because the Straits Times can do no better. I never allow my sister to read the Straits Times because I am afraid she will mistake it for a source of good English and henceforth write like it.

Yes, I am digressing and ranting. Go on, sue me.

You know what else I hate about the entire affair? A bunch of people commiserate in their misery, a young girl dares to contradict what they have said by herself, dares to tell them it's nonsense and she gets fired at. We are not even talking about logical reprisal here, we are talking about unreasoning moralist screeches. The fact that her father is also the MP for Ang Mo Kio seems to mean that she too must be as publicly responsible as her father, that somehow, her father being an MP has something to do with all this. It smacks of political expediency which is disgusting even if it is a fair move were it to have been ochestrated by the opposition. Well, my parents are not MPs, my family isn't even as well off as hers, but I will say what I say and I have the right to it. I have seen what our system can do for those who are truly willing to transcend their own circumstances and it does not seem possible for anyone of talent and aptitude to wallow in mediocrity unless they chose to. So there.

C'est tout.