Single-issue people

  The world would be a much more boring place without single-issue people. They are the ones who believe fervently in a single thing, often holding views a long way from the common consensus. They bring every conversation around to their pet subject. They harangue, though they are also the ones who more often than most, get off their behinds and do something about their beliefs, even if merely distributing pamphlets at a street corner. They seem oblivious to ridicule, and often unrealistic about what they can possibly achieve.

They are the people we avoid inviting to our parties, lest they browbeat all our other guests to numbness. Even if we start off sympathetic to their cause, they so overpush their arguments, we are tempted to argue back. Finally, we are annoyed and dismissive, and call them obsessed.

Yet, if we survey the history of the world, we owe a great debt to single-issue people. They are the ones to have had enough persistence to press an unpopular point of view, which eventually engenders change in complacent societies. It took decades to get slavery abolished. Decades to give the vote to women, to bring public awareness to bloodsports, to extending international protection to whales. Today, they continue to bring pressure on human rights abuses and on ecological mass-destruction.

Eccentrics are rarely looked upon kindly by most societies. They don't quite fit in, they raise discomfitting ideas, they stake out what at first sight looks like absurd positions. Among the eccentrics, the most fervent, the single-issue die-hards, are particularly annoying.

They mainstream media won't give them a voice, or when they do, the reports are often slanted to ridicule their positions -- the better to win reader approval. Sometimes the law is brought to bear on them, especially when they bring their views out onto the streets. Don't for a moment imagine that the law is used dispassionately. The Salvation Army (for example) can set up a stand, hand out pamphlets, ring bells and collect money. The Euthanasia League, the Sex Workers Sorority, the Dismantle GRCs Campaign, the Militant Vegetarians or Gays for Gender Equality will be closely watched and immediately arrested for the slightest infringement.

Perhaps the Salvation Army is a legitimate organisation, you may say, whereas if the other groups are not legalised, they wouldn't enjoy the same freedoms. But then the question becomes why the other groups are not legalised. If it is any harder for them to become legalised, it still shows that the law is not used dispassionately.

Or put the question in another way: why should groups be legalised at all? The process of requiring groups to register is itself a sifting process that permits the politically acceptable, and disallows challenging ideas.

Singapore is place that sets a very conservative tone. Single-issue people have an unusually hard time here. The media are state-controlled, and non-mainstream individuals or groups can't get revolutionary ideas across. The authorities play ultra-safe. Ministers exhort people to understand our history and our particular circumstances, to balance all factors. Above all, to appreciate our vulnerability, to preserve social harmony and not to "ape the West". But if we do this, always plugging in the same inputs, we run the real risk that we end up getting the same output, a form of group-think. Yet group-think is very comfortable. Everybody around you thinks the same, therefore it must be right.

What will it take to break down this monolith? Outsiders who refuse to take the same prescribed factors into consideration, who insist on stirring new ingredients into the pot. And who are less than sensitive to ridicule, sarcasm and even social niceties to keep banging away.

Maybe their ideas ultimately lead nowhere, but you won't know unless you put aside present prejudices and examine them seriously. The only thing we know is that no society has remained healthy by remaining unchanging. But change is very difficult to effect. Anyone who has tried to change an organisation or even a few other persons' habits, can attest to that. It's going to need forcefulness and tenacity, the very qualities single-issue people tend to have by the truckloads. Value them.

© Yawning Bread 

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