I have never experienced such unbridled joy in front of a computer screen with both my hands on the keyboard than when I signed in to my email account two weeks ago.
Fan mail.
I actually received fan mail from someone other than my Mom (Hi Mom!) or myself pretending to be somebody else.
Yes, so they were not exactly unsolicited, I sent my open letter to a group of students in my school with surnames starting with the letter ‘R’.
But still! Fan Mail!
Finally, I have gotten a taste of the recognition that I so craved for and boy was it intoxicating. This must be what it feels like to be jacked up on heroin. But like the high extracted from the drug, the joy I felt was fleeting and soon anxiety and self doubt hung on my shoulders like a wet blanket.
I immediately abandoned my original plan of sending the letter to everyone in school, partly because of how tedious and cumbersome the process turned out to be and partly because I already have what I hoped to have gotten in sending out the letter.
Fan Mail! Any good heroin user knows you have to start small, too much too soon and you would overdose and die from an overinflated ego.
But then the high wears off and you are fixing for another hit.
So here it is then,
A Response To An Open Letter To The Class Of 2010, Written By The Same Person, That Nobody Asked For.
It would seem that I have underestimated my persuasiveness, because nobody I sent the letter out to replied saying that it was overly optimistic and even naïve to suggest that all the world’s problems are symptoms of people not being loved enough.
There is a reason why when you ask someone the question, “What is Love?”
They usually give some nauseatingly pathetic answer like, “It is when we sit in a room and not talk for two hours because there is no need for words.”
Yeah I know, I had to forcibly hold down my dinner just typing it out.
By that logic I’m in love with everyone I’ve encountered on long bus rides, dentist waiting rooms and libraries.
Why does Love feel so hollow?
The reason people give such face meltingly obtuse answers is because nobody has a clue what it really is.
If the Meaning of Love was a person, it would have been gang-raped by Hollywood romantic-comedy movies, religious preachers, political leaders and hallmark card writers that its brain would have self induced amnesia to avoid dealing with crippling emotional issues.
Here’s a secret. Writers lie.
Writers lie because that’s what the readers want, they want to believe that life is usually interesting enough to warrant the use of extravagant superlatives.
They want to believe in ‘sun-kissed plains that stretched as far as the eye can see’. They want to believe in ‘the giddy delight of his soft lips against mine’.
So I was being disingenuous as my letter seemed to imply that with a bit of Love, all of life’s problems could be washed away, like Love was some magic all purpose cleaning detergent.
Look, we still haven’t gotten people to piss in the urinal and not all over the fucking floor, I think we still have a ways to go before we solve the problem of poverty, hunger and accidentally dropping bombs over other people’s heads, none of them can be solved by liberally applying Love and wiping with a soft cloth.
Not only that, it is dangerous too, many in the pursuit of what they perceive to be Love do terrible things, I also said this much in my open letter.
So it would seem the absence of love may be the root of many of the world’s problems but its presence is not the cure.
Love belongs to the same class as Equality. An aspiration that is to be pursued by can never be achieved.
(All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others) The great Lee Kuan Yew, himself
said as much.The latest flavour of the month here in Singapore is sedition.
3 youths were arrested for creating a racist group on facebook and a
pastor was called up by the ISD for posting videos that ‘trivialized’ and ‘insulted’ Buddhists and Taoists. Here’s keeping my fingers crossed nothing happens to me.
What crime have these people committed? According to the
Sedition Act, they have
‘raised discontent or disaffection amongst the citizens of Singapore or the residents in Singapore’ and
‘promoted feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore’.
Hello, what’s this? An act should
not be considered seditious if it
‘points out, with a view to their removal, any matters producing or having a tendency to produce feelings of ill-will and enmity between different races or classes of the population of Singapore’It is obvious that such highfalutin aspirations like Love and Equality can never be achieved and in fact is pernicious to the
Peace, no wait that is also highfalutin, the status quo and therefore it can be construed that anything promoting these ideals are in fact seditious.
As such I demand that the following be removed for being seditious, in that it
‘brings into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the Government’.
We, the citizens of Singapore,
pledge ourselves as one united people,
regardless of race, language or religion,
to build a democratic society
based on justice and equality
so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and
progress for our nation.
