Social media is a wonderful thing. One of the great pluses
from social media was being able to reconnect with my school friends whom I’ve
not seen for two decades and who live a few thousand miles away. Another great
plus of social media has been to show me the very people that I shouldn’t socialize
with. This has been particularly true of the current spike in Singapore’s COVID
19 cases, most of which were among Singapore’s foreign worker population, who mostly
from the Indian Subcontinent.
This incident has brought out the best and the worst in my
fellow citizens. It’s been heartening to see how some of volunteered time to
help out and how some have raised money to help the workers, who are at the
bottom of our social heap.
On the other hand, its exceedingly disheartening to see some
comments in the opposite direction. What’s even more disturbing is that some of
the comments are not made by the old folks who never went to school One of the
gems that I picked up was from someone who was around my age, if not younger
regarding a petition that someone else had sent on line about looking after
foreign workers:
It goes without saying that I believe that any “normal”
human being should be offended by such remarks. Look at the choice of words,
especially the word “disobedient.” It reveals the mentality of the writer, who seems
to believe that poor people should be grateful for being allowed to clean the
shit of the well to do.
We all know that the workers from the Indian Subcontinent
have traveled the world to work in the “rough” jobs elsewhere because it’s
better than what they get at home. For the most part, these guys are
appreciative of the opportunities they’re getting. Nobody is saying that you
should put these guys up in a five-star hotel or triple their salaries.
What we are saying is that these guys should not be treated
unfairly. The same basic rights like getting your salary on time and living in
a place that does not cause you to die of disease, should apply to them as it
applies to anyone else. The same writer who feels that dark skinned labourers should
be grateful for cleaning our shit, has the opposite view when it comes to
dealing with people at the other end of the social scale.
He says, “ There aremany reasons that the whites are the top class race. Gone were the days that Asians tried to color their hair with yellow orwear blue contact lens. Now, they are trying to be “Twinkies” to make their behavior like thewhites. Are they not racists to themselves? They discarded their identities and languages to make themselves more likethe whites. Actually, such behavior is very important for us to adopt because we areserving the world leader, the USA. Otherwise, we can be outdated because the world is depending on USleadership. Many countries are following the USA for politics, businesses, andentertainment. US currency is used for international transaction; the movies and themusic in the USA are always the most popular in the world; American slangshave influenced the world; and the education in the USA is always at the top. For that, we have no reason to discriminate the whites.”
Unfortunately, his misunderstanding of
the USA is almost as large as it is of the Indian Subcontinent. He assumes that
America is a “White” nation, which it does not claim to be. He forgets that
American heroes of sport and music like Samuel L Jackson, Michael Jordan and
Mohamad Ali are not white. While he has rightly pointed out that America is a
world power and world leader, it is not because it is a “white nation,” but because
it celebrates heroes or people who excel regardless of their pigmentation.
Perhaps he sees his points are based on
his upbringing. In Singapore, most our manual labourers are from the Indian
Subcontinent and generally dark skinned and many of our senior executives are white expatriates. So, pigmentation becomes tied with your income and if this
is all that you see, then you assume this is natural. Like many people, he
probably has no malice towards the downtrodden, he merely does not see them and
when the downtrodden speak up about their lot, he gets upset that they have
upset the natural order of things.
I think back to my national service days,
when the Chief of Artillery organized a live firing demo of a 155-gun howitzer
in the aftermath of the tragedy in New Zealand. The demo was run by the senior specialist
of the artillery formation. All of them had served for at least 20-years a
piece and all of them had volunteered because they believed it was necessary to
get a batch that had seen their friends die from firing the 155mm to believing
in the 155mm.
Their reward for this was to be sent on a mission to clear
blinds (rounds that did not explode upon hitting the target). This is a
dangerous job (what is blind can become unblind) and if you think of the
climate and terrain in Kanchanaburi Province Thailand (you have to climb hills
in hot weather – hot defined as in approaching 38 degrees centigrade).
Yet the powers that be did not order lunch for them. The
packed lunch was supposed to be reserved for the evaluators, who are all commissioned
officers, nearly all Chinese and their main job is to “observe” the unit in
action from a land rover.
The demo team got their lunch but only after a struggle but
the point remains, there was no thought for the guy on the ground, or the guys doing
the tough and dangerous work. There was no malice intended but as far as the
officialdom was concerned, the guys sitting in a land rover were more important
than the guys who had cleared blinds. The best part was, it was the guys who
had to clear blinds who had proven their loyalty to the organization through
years of service.
Nobody was asking for anything special. The specialists were
not saying they wanted to be fed caviar nor were not saying they wouldn’t do their
jobs. They were simply asking for lunch before doing physically demanding work.
Likewise, when people are asking for
better treatment for foreign workers in Singapore, what we’re asking for is not
for foreign workers to get champagne brunches but for them to be put in housing
that does not kill them of disease.
We’ve had a situation for too long where the guys at the
bottom of the heap are merely not visible to the rest of us. I hope that
Covid-19 changes this. Just as the Specialist core is the backbone of the army,
we need to remember that the guys doing the work are the backbone of the economy
and our prosperity.
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