Monday, November 26, 2007
HARANGUE
Have been allowing many of my thoughts to wander much this holiday; swivelling myself into the world of what ifs and whatnots, dreaming passionately about a predetermined time span, the later play of a puppet show perhaps, or to round it up- the future. Premonitory! Some may exclaim to a being like my kind, constantly grounded in expectancy, rooted in audaciousness. Maybe there’s really hardly anything to dream about for this doomed anthropoid (doomed enough to render myself a non-being), left shattered in abject folly. Ha, but she perseveres (AUDACIOUS INDEED) through the musty, impervious (seemingly) membrane in a humble (irony! But I promise sincerity) ploy for her little share of ebullience- assuming she is deserving of it.
If you’d spare her for her felony, then you are born of pure sympathetic blood. Indeed.
Something is happening to the world now, this very minute, this exact moment. Nations worldwide are merging, borders are gradually fading. Competition is intensifying, uncertainty pervading.
WELL, the earth is shrinking, it’s shrinking! The periphery surrounding United States and Singapore has shrunk from half a year to one day, and the same goes for any other two random nations you pick on this planet. The real diameter of earth is not 7926.41 miles but 30 hours. After all, the true meaning in distance itself is it’s representation of the time span taken to overcome that distance, (like how distance is proportionate to time taken to travel through it). When the time needed to counter the distance decreases, then distance automatically does (who cares about its numerical value), does it not? For instance, to the wealthy with chaperones at their beck and call, Orchard Road is very near because it takes only 10 minutes by car. However to the peasant who coincidentally lives in the same area as the wealthy, Orchard road is not so near because he does not have enough money to take a bus, and takes 40 minutes to walk there. Who here then, bothers that Orchard Road is XXX kilometres away?
Also, the world too, though getting smaller, is getting increasingly convoluted. Perhaps it is the compactness in its size that leaves less room for the quagmire of decrepit and waste to be shunned off (where to, I do not know for sure. Mars maybe?). What can happen now? The waste is then stuck permanently in the very core of the planet gravity has sucked us on, serially annulling it, as it mixes with the beauty and purity God once created it with.
GLOBALISATION, have you not guessed what I was trying to get at. So, which shall it be; friend of foe?
No, I am not discussing this term here just because it has become the zeitgeist of our century, nor because it is the dominating word on every newsstand or bookshelf (statistics have shown that the number of books and articles with the word ‘global’ on it have increased from 13 between 1980 and 1984, to 600 in 1996, and still increasing). It is because I am genuinely concerned about this matter, more for its cons than pros, and perhaps caught in the deception that expressing my concern can alleviate the disappointment I feel with myself from worrying, yet not being able to do anything about it.
Pick up an object from say, IKEA and read its label. It says ‘Made in Philippines’. In he past, there would have been no doubt this claim. The global division of labour was so clearly classified back then into namely, the production of manufactured goods from industrialized countries and the provision of raw materials from non-industrialised countries. However at present, this simple flow has been meticulously thwarted. With the geographical relocation of industries and fragmentation of production processes, this flow has morphed into a highly complex kaleidoscopic structure. From here, we can infer that rapid developments in transport, communications that have taken place in the production process. This may seem highly beneficial on the surface, but wait a minute, technology comes with a price.
The labyrinth of trade routes have grown increasingly susceptible to manipulation. Crafty smugglers have remained prevalent, often snitching on the escalating tax rates imposed by each country, camouflaging drugs or the like alongside imports/exports. The complicated production process has created many a loophole, only to be filled in by even vicious intentions. Aside the smugglers, comes the bad guys (so many types of bad guys that a generalisation will be most appropriate). The bad guys that placed mercury in canned products poisoning thousands of innocents, that added diethylene glycol in our toothpastes (a deadly chemical that kills, google this for more details), rodent poisons in cat or dog food that took the lives of those adorable endearings. What can be worse than death? These dangers have crusaded to an ultimatum. What matters now is the magnitude of these dangers, which I definitely cannot guarantee for the future.
Then comes the global financial system, imperative or even mutually exclusive with the global division of labour. 24 hour transactions (imagine a million machines rigorously recording and displaying figures, another million beings stampeded on by accounts right this moment as I am busy inserting more letters onto my notebook whilst enjoying the night breeze and feasting on B&J’s Dublin mudslide HEAVENLY STUFF ) taking place in global transaction centres have been labelled as sources vulnerable to contagion; attested to by the financial crises of the East Asia and emerging market economies in the late 1990s, and perhaps greedy embezzlers; profit-minded nature of us humans. Look, we can’t even trust America now for accurate calculations of things like GDP, forget about the other minor transactions.
And this is only the start. Do not forget; the problems of industrialized countries pale into insignificance compared with those of the poorest countries, or otherwise known as Third World countries.
No, I am not ranting on poverty just to proclaim the devotion of my pledge as a member of ONEsingapore (http://www.onesingapore.org/). I’d like to remind myself, and the sympathetic soul out there who is reading this(refer to beginning of post), that we are one force. We are all human beings, and as much as we may disdain, we have to learn to co-exist with one another. Friedman has duly impressed me with his philosophy on neighbourhood effects (aka externalities for econs students) and it is pretty enthralling and even intimidating thinking of it. For instance, the level of your education affects another (I bet you didn’t think so) because by exalting yourself to a higher level of knowledge, you are inevitably contributing to society’s well being as a whole. And your contribution to society affects me, because it is a contribution to the surroundings confronting me. The more well educated society is, the better the environment for me to survive in. Get the gist? The list goes on; better educated society, more creative inventions which precedes better life for mankind, blahblah.. There is this intricate inexplicable connection linking every human being and his actions which so many of us are oblivious to.
So the point is, we ARE one force. While the ownership of Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces ascends over here, things aren’t looking nearly as good over there. Kofi Annan says Almost half the world's population lives on less than two dollars a day, yet even this statistic fails to capture the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship that is the daily lot of the world's poor. Believe it, a child dies from extreme poverty every 3 seconds. THREE SECONDS that means hundreds of children have perished since I started typing this nonsensical piece. If this rich-poor disparity goes on, trust me, Mother Earth will really fall into shambles. And I don’t really like that idea.
Men are wretched, I once told a friend. We are astonishingly imperfect; our hunger for affluence is never satiated, yet we do not realise the thirst in us that has parched our oesophaguses. The thirst for righteousness. Where has humanity gone?
I just realised I digressed a horrible lot, maybe that’s why my GP essay grades are so abysmal. But back to the main point..
I just dream that in the hustle and bustle of this shrinking planet, I’d be able to marry an ugly, hot, romantic poet (does one even exist?) and we’d migrate to a place filled with butterfliesrainbowschocolatefountains. We will sigh at this shackled world whilst writing poems or the like, reading, playing the violin and drinking hunny. Oh, and eating B&Js.
Ok, back to reality I better stop dreaming. Goodnight.
1:06 AM
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