Alexis Ong: Singaporeans just don't give a damn
For some reason, my brain doesn’t view “not giving a damn” -- henceforth referred to as NGD -- as synonymous with apathy. That's because there’s a little extra je ne sais quoi in the former that offers no solutions.
It mostly boils down to semantics. For instance, there are tons of NGOs and research projects all over the world devoted to voter apathy, but when presented with someone who just doesn’t give a damn about voting, the connotations are slightly different.
Here in Singapore, NGD is a great thing. We don’t really have to care much about anything because almost everything gets done for us. Oxymoronic as it may be, we can actually afford to proactively NGD.
A couple of weeks ago, however, we got a reminder of just how much the majority of the population cares about public safety. The cops set up several car bomb scenarios across the island, complete with billowing smoke, ticking noises and gas containers on the passenger seats.
Then they sat back to watched fewer than 4 percent of peak-hour passersby calling in to report the booby-trapped cars.
Result: Lots of people like to talk about calling the cops, and enjoy berating other people about why they’re not on the phone to the cops.
My mother saw one of the “tests” on Orchard Road and called 999. She was surprised when the responder told her it was just a test, then proceeded to quiz her on why she called it in.
The last time I checked, getting killed is a pretty major motivational factor.
The responder asked my mother what kind of incentives she thought would encourage more people to be more “civic-minded.” Again, not getting blown up would seem to be the big incentive there. But it’s the typical carrot-and-stick routine we’re so comfortable with here: no carrot -- don’t bother.
In this case, the stick is getting yourself blown up, but NGD strikes again. Maybe they should introduce a fine. That would really set some people on fire.
On a side note, this excuse for NGD stood out for me in the wake of the car tests: a guy on a "Straits Times" forum pointed out that real terrorists wouldn’t use such obvious bomb paraphernalia, so the smoking cars obviously couldn’t have been real.
Here’s another variation of NGD that’s just downright sad. I conducted a brief survey in which half of the people weren’t 100 percent sure what our emergency phone number was. Four out of 10 actually thought it was 911. Yes. 911.
A few years ago, at a prominent local junior college, a student was hit by a bus and one of the witnesses spent the first few minutes repeatedly dialing 911 for help.
For the record 911 is the number for the United States. For Singapore, it is 999 for the police, and 995 for the ambulance and fire department.
For those of you familiar with the old local TV show "Triple 9," I hope to God you know the number to dial is 999, and not freaking 911. James Lye would be pissed.
You live here, and as a citizen it’s your responsibility to know these things. People laugh at the “dumb American” stereotype all the time, but aren’t aware that we have equally ignorant pockets of people here.
Don’t believe me? Read this and tell me it’s not plausible that 40 percent of a randomly selected subject pool think we live in an episode of "COPS."
Nonetheless, I suppose it’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to call in a smoking car when stuff like this happens.
Just the other week, a couple of friends were walking down Circular Road on their lunch breaks and came across a group of people gathered around a man on the ground. He’d fainted and nobody was doing anything.
Apparently it’s cool to watch guys faint and pass out now.
One friend ran to get him some water and the other managed to find his boss, a restaurant proprietor in the row of shophouses -- who failed to recognize his employee at first glance -- “Oh, yeah, he does work for me. Is he drunk?”
Maybe it’s because as a country, we’ve built ourselves up as a corporate powerhouse and extolled that special breed of self-preservation associated with business culture.
At risk of sounding sentimental, though, it’s draining our ability to cultivate intrinsic civic virtues such as compassion, responsibility and social vigilance that are now being flogged by totally absurd national campaigns like the Kindness Movement -- seriously, someone call George Orwell.
These are organic concepts that can’t be indoctrinated in people -- well, at least not without the help of mind-altering drugs -- and as long we can’t even be proactive about people drowning, fainting, and things blowing up in public areas, we’re screwed.
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