darkholme

My views on National Service

This is a pretty contraversial topic.

Today, I read this on Tomorrow.sg:
http://tomorrow.sg/archives/2006/09/20/someone_escaped_from_conscriptio.html

For those of you lazy people who can't be bothered to read the entry linked and the comments that follow, I will give you a short summary.

A person spent 18 months hiding out in a foreign country, trying to seek asylum and running away from the Singapore army. He had served a few months as a conscript before "realizing that humanity should not be subjected to such indignity."

This person has now been granted asylum and can never return to Singapore.

Now upon first reading this I was quite stunned at the tone of the post. In particular, the phrase "realizing that humanity should not be subjected to such indignity." Really? Is it really THAT bad?

Ok to allow for some disclaimer here, those of you who know me well would probably realise that I would probably never experience the same kind of horrible treatment that other people experienced because I am an officer, and with that comes some priviledges.

I'm trying not to make any judgement on the person who has left. I hope that I'm able to be fair enough not to do that. The main thing that I'm thinking about or that I'm concerned about is whether or not I'm too naive, that I don't question authority or the status quo.

I guess you can definitely say that I've led an extremely extremely sheltered life. I'm sorry if at any point in time I've not been able to empathise with any of your suffering or difficulties.

I used to think that it's all about attitude. I felt that having a positive attitude to life generally makes any kind of hardship easier. Generally, I had this "well, things may be bad now, but it's a good thing that they aren't much worse!" attitude.

I'm not sure if that is possible for everyone. It makes me realise that I can't be too flippant about what people say when they feel that their situation is bad. Instead, I should listen more and help more, where I can.

But this still means that I don't question authority that much. *sigh* still kinda confused. I thought that blogging might make things clearer, but it hasn't really. Will ponder on this more.

posted by kelvin @ 11:04 pm