I would like to express my deepest condolences to his family and friends.
This week has been a period of national mourning. Sure, everyone is still going to school or going to work, carrying out with their daily activities, sometimes still cracking jokes and laughing... But the mood has never really been quite as sombre before. The documentaries on television, the images on the MRT station screens, the emotional posts on Facebook... And personally, listening to all the speeches by my school's principal, watching the flag brought down the half-mast, I was sad.
The worst thing is, while Mr LKY was alive, I never bothered to find out more about him and what he has done. I have even remembered scoffing at the idea of reading his biography some years ago. The father of modern Singapore? Back then, I could not bring myself to care. But recently, since his passing, I have learnt more about him and I can now appreciate his efforts properly. I feel like I have realised too late though. I guess, in my sad case, "You never know what you have until it's lost". Indeed, Singapore has lost someone extraordinary, but I believe that his spirit will live on for generations to come.
Thank you, Mr LKY.
I will not be talking too much about all he has done for Singapore, good or bad, though I am truly grateful for the good he has done and I respect his contributions.
But I am going to describe the queue to parliament house yesterday, as well as share my opinions on the video by Amos Yee and BBC article + Singapore's response (but really, should I even waste my time on that?).
Yesterday, at about 8.30pm, I met Valence, Zhiyong, Yee Theng, Joel and Jiawen at City Hall. We followed the crowd, walk-jogging to join the queue (we were in queue 3) and arrived at the tented area in the Padang at 9pm, where they predicted that we had to wait 8 hours. We sat there, talking about things, sometimes laughing (not so appropriate for the situation) and resting a little. Finally, at 12.30am, we got ready to move.
Summary: We sat for 3.5 hours at the Padang.
We followed the queue, stopping and starting and stopping and starting, complaining about the heat, and finally, we were out of the tented area at around 2am. There was a slight drizzle too, where we grabbed umbrellas for. By then I was a little tired and quite annoyed at how frequently we had to stop. Boy, I had no idea what was coming up next.
Summary: We took 1.5 hours to walk out of the Padang.
We started walking the loop at 2.45am. Stopping, starting, stopping, starting, stopping... It went on forever. I was mentally tired (from sleeping late the previous night) and my legs were tired (my right quadriceps were strained from S&W the day before, and still hurts now). We only walked into the floating platform at 4.15am. I mean, there was free water and food along the way, but it was quite a distance.
Summary: We took 2.25 hours to walk from the Padang to the floating platform.
From there, we had to do a complete U-turn and walk back straight towards the parliament house. It went a little faster, and we reached a "checkpoint" of a sorts at 5am, where the people told us we had about 1.5 hours to go, which raised an upcry. We had been queuing for 8 hours so far, so 1.5 hours more than the estimated time seemed like cruel joke to me.
However, at about 5.30am, we made it. We walked through the security checkpoint and into the parliament house, where we got that fresh blast of air-conditioning. When Mr LKY's portrait and coffin came into view, I felt like crying. I thanked him in my head, bowed and got out.
Summary: We took 1.25 hours to walk from the floating platform to the parliament house.
Then Zhiyong, Jiawen and I took the MRT to AMK, reaching there at 6.30am and had breakfast at McDonald's. I left AMK at about 8am, and not falling asleep on the bus ride was one of the most challenging things ever.
Was it worth the wait? Let's just say that even though that was a meaningful-ish experience I would never forget, I felt that all that time spent waiting was really too much. I felt the need to do it though, and I'm glad I didn't give up halfway.
For the next part, I would just like to say that I have done almost no research, and I won't be stupid enough to argue with anything that anyone has (or has not) said, simply because I don't know enough to back up any arguments I make. So I am going to remain rather neutral on these two cases.
And yes I also know that we shouldn't be making such a big deal about this, but I'm bored, so let's go.
The video by Amos Yee is essentially... Flaming Mr LKY? With a healthy dose of profanities, he talks about Mr LKY in a negative and in my opinion, a disrespectful manner. I suppose some of his points might be valid, but I don't know, and maybe some of his points are invalid. In my opinion, it is okay to discuss anyone's or anything's good and bad points, but I suppose you have to be sensitive to circumstances, as well as do it on the right platform, and in the right tone, so that your opinion will be constructive and it will benefit people. In the comments section of the video, people are arguing with him and each other, which disappoints me, as I am pretty sure this kind of conflict is exactly what Mr LKY doesn't want. I guess by adding this opinion in, I'm contributing to the conflict, but oh well.
I think I won't be talking about the BBC article, but here are links to the articles:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32090420
http://www.straitstimes.com/news/singapore/more-singapore-stories/story/gum-the-west-wrong-about-singapore-20150328
Rest in peace.
Thanks for reading this relatively formal post, sorry if it was very mundane.
Lynnette