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Be
silent no more
Singapore
Democrats
13 Mar 08
The late S Rajaratnam and former
deputy prime minister, once recounted what Lee Kuan Yew taught:
"If you want to break someone's window, tell him that you
are going to burn down his house. So when you really break his
window, he'll be so grateful that he'll thank you for it."
So
when our Home Affairs Minister tells us that he would consider
liberalising Speakers' Corner to allow limited forms of
demonstrations, do we celebrate?
(Or, for that matter,
when he says that he will give the public a "full account"
of Mas Selamat's escape when he won't answer questions by the
public, should we commend him?)
Our right to speak and
assemble peacefully cannot be taken away by the Government. We
own that right and anyone who takes it away has robbed you. Let
us never forget that.
And when the government robs you of
the one thing that makes you what you are - human, you don't
whine and you don't beg. You go out and take it back.
Through
the years, the PAP has stripped us of all dignity and value. It
tells us that it feeds us and gives us a nice airport. In return,
it wants us to bow our heads and be silent.
Be silent even
as it ridicules us and lies to us.
Be silent even as it
bribes us to look away when our elderly have to work when their
bodies can take no more.
Be silent when the poor live on
biscuits and Milo, and needy families get evicted from their
public housing.
Be silent when they take our hard-earned
wages and refuse to give it back to us or tell us what they do
with it.
Be silent when they engorge their bank accounts
with our money and then tell us that they are worth even more.
A people silent is a people without a soul. And people
without a soul is life's saddest tragedy.
When God
breathed life into us he wanted us to live it, not pawn it.
The
nay-sayers and the agents of autocracy will try to wring every
ounce of hope left in you. They will try to demoralise you with
their "be realistic" lectures. They will try to instill
fear in you. Don't let them.
If you do, they would have
silenced you yet again.
Come Saturday let us, with
dignity and peaceful resolve, choose not to be silent any longer.
It is not complicated. Just by being there with the rest of us
who have pledged to not sign the Faustian pact, you will make a
difference.
Every once in a while, an opportunity comes
along and calls us to demonstrate our courage and to do the right
thing. That opportunity is Saturday, 15 Mar. Come.
"You
live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your
own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be
loaned your property, your families, and your very lives.
All
this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not
from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves
render as powerful as he is...
He who thus domineers over
you has only two eyes, only two hands...he has indeed nothing
more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.
Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you
do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to
beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you?...What could
he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who
plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who
kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?...
Resolve
to serve no more, and you are at once freed.
I do not ask
that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but
simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him,
like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall
of his own weight and break into pieces."
-
Étienne de la Boétie, 1552
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