pushing the envelope of decency.

A Modest Proposal.

Dear Editor of the Straits Times,

I write in to offer my opinion on the recent Serangoon Gardens foreign workers issue. The ministers have spoken and the national newspaper has set the national agenda for us citizens to follow, and I wholeheartedly agree with them.

The action plan is clear. We have to send our middle-class citizens for re-national education, and also embrace foreign workers with open arms and hearts. How such middle class Singaporeans who live in landed property can have such disgustingly overboard nationalism (that borders upon the Aryan race fanaticism) is beyond the comprehension of all Straits Times readers, as your team of reporters has so sharply emphasised. They must be too stuck up in their middle-class snobbery for far too long!

But of course, we mustn't forget our indispensable foreign workers. Since we need them to lay every brick and concrete, we must obviously house them decently and integrate them into all sectors of our gracious society. I propose that the next dormitories be built near our upper-crust ministers' humble residences, since they have so nicely pleaded for our understanding on this issue. I'm sure they won't mind leaving next to the labourer who built their ministries or renovated their offices.

But of course, if such measures are unrealistic and might lead to freak effects (such as transport congestion, security issues or disturbances) that our generous forgiving minds cannot comprehend, I offer the tried-and-tested solution. We can continue the tradition of housing them in low-class Singaporeans' estates. (Since middle-class pertains to landed property living Singaporeans, the low-class would probably be HDB dwellers who comprise of 80+% of the population. Plenty of space.) There has not been any major talk of petitions or headlines regarding lower-class citizens complaining about foreign worker disturbances, which we can take immediately as signs of consent and even outright agreement.

Never mind our general education level where the normal ah-pek and ah-ma would probably not know what a petition looks like, or even that MPs might have been too busy handing out vouchers to needy residents that they fail to notice that entire blocks are turned into HDB dormitories. We need the space to house workers decently. Let's just find plots of land to do so, and turn a blind eye to everything else, real or imagined. The classic 'sucks to be you' scenario. Now that's fair and equality to everyone, right? We all have an equal chance of having dormitories next to us.

I wish to commend the paper as well for being the conscience of the nation, always ready to strike and riptose at whatever threatens the greater good, never mind the vocal minority who might suffer. I must single out the Saturday commentary and Sunday Times headlines for special praise. By so selectively picking and choosing extremely biased case studies of foreign workers, the paper has so effectively dispelled our misconceived notion. I would definately engage foreign workers in my block in casual english conversation next time.

And we see that the interviewees profess to a lack of drinking. My my we must have been so paranoid that we dreamed up the flock of foreign workers drinking alcohol in the spaces around Jurong Point!

So it must be that we must tolerate some of their habits, such as talking loudly since our anti-social society needs greater interaction. So it also must be that we should not mind the few black sheep who stare at our womenfolk rarely; they are lonely migrants, after all. We hear all these justifications for the litany of ill-perceived misconceptions and they would really go a long way towards building a gracious society where we must accommodate them, not the other way round.

Overall, I must commend on the paper for a job well done, for so cleverly skirting around the issue and painting it so black-and-white that xenophobia seems to be an exclusive trait of middle-class (certainly a very laughable term for Serangoon Gardens residents) Singaporeans. In the events where 'national interests' and 'social fabric' is threatened, it is very nice to see that the mainstream media has effectively used a divide-and-conquer rule to shame concerns into submission and diminished government authority and responsibility over the issue.

So our authorities herald tolerance and decry bigotry. But shouldn't initiation courses be compulsory for foreign workers for better integration and foster that sense of understanding we need so much? It appears that the ordinary Singapore folks aren't the only ones who treat such workers as 'throwaways'.