| Yawning
Bread. August 2007
Pity the heliconias
|
|
|
I was astounded when I saw where they erected the metal frames of the
market stalls to come.
It was built right over a bed of lovely heliconias, along some 100 metres of Commonwealth Avenue West in Clementi Town.
Has no one in Clementi spoken up in protest? Presumably the Town Council, in issuing a permit to the pasar malam syndicate to set up their stalls, will have specified that they should returf and replant the heliconias on quitting. But even so, is this they way we treat our environment? Everything's dispensable for a bit of money? Surely, it will be quite a while before the new plants mature? In any case, I've always wondered whose interest is served by pasar malams. There are plenty of shops in Clementi. In the topmost picture, you can see a whole row of them at the right edge of the photograph. By permitting pasar malams to operate, isn't the Town Council undercutting the shops' traffic and sales? * * * * *
I thought this display of bitter irony should be preserved for posterity before it is dismantled, thus the photograph. What city of possibilities when the same week, we've faced ban after ban?
* * * * *
|
||
On the subject of the banned lecture by
Douglas Sanders, I thought this comment posted online in the Straits Times
discussion board to be quite typical of the attitudes of the (almost
always Christian fundamentalist) anti-gay lobby.
As readers would know from the Home Affairs Ministry's press release (see box at right), the government insinuated that Sanders would be interfering in Singapore's domestic politics. I had never suggested to the police that that would be the intent or direction of the talk, and now that I have seen the paper "377 - and the unnatural afterlife of British colonialism", I'm even more confident that the ministry had no basis whatsoever for making such a sinister claim. Sanders wrote that paper as the basis for a lectures he would give in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore -- and I stress that Malaysia didn't think Sanders was interfering in the country's domestic affairs. In the paper, Sanders traces the origins of the law from the time of King Henry VIII of England. He discusses how the law found its way into many countries' lawbooks from the US to Nigeria to India and Australia, albeit in different forms. He then discusses what has since happened to this law in these various countries. If you read georgezee's comment, you'd see him taking a very anti-intellectual position that in effect says, "we already know all there is to know". There's nothing foreigners can teach us. What's happening internationally is, in his words, "perverted". How similar this sounds, to the stance taken by Islamist extremists! And yet, our government mollycoddles this bunch. * * * * * Miak cancelled it, but by then, lots of people were incensed. Enough to do their own private picnics. On 9 August 2007, around 150 of them -- four or five times more than the organisers had ever hoped -- showed up at the park either wearing pink or carrying something pink. They set up picnic mats in small groups around Symphony Lake.
"A sea of pink," my friend Jean told me. However, "there were many straight families there too with their kids, playing with frisbees and goofing around. Nobody batted an eyelid even when we were so obviously gay." Clearly, the gulf between the
laissez-faire reality of Singapore society and the intolerant campaign by
our government and their bedfellows, the religious right, is wider than ever before. © Yawning Bread
|
|
|
|
Footnotes
Addenda None
|
|
Before
long, the pasar malam (Malay for "night market") syndicate will
have boarded over the plants and turf, suffocating them to death. This, iin order
to make some money by renting out the stalls so created. On the right is a
closer shot of the flowers. Look at them before they die.
