The Arab Spring-Democracy Will Not Work In Singapore

It happened, Egypt had her revolution and soon after the heroes became villains and the excited bystanders in the media and ordinary people like you and me looked away.

But old habits die hard. It doesn’t matter that we see America’s export of democratic experiments failing time and again. We can’t let go of the movies of “one man against the world” or “giving it to the man”.

But many of those upheavals were in countries that were having problems.

Not First World Problems.
Not “I can’t buy a car” problems.
Or “you don’t make me feel like I am complete” problems.

No, people in those countries were staring down a barrel of a gun.
They were being trafficked and raped and beaten.

So that they reached for some desperate promise of freedom is almost understandable.

But here in Singapore?

What are we wanting in our version of democracy?

It seems many of the opposition parties
are posturing for our Arab Spring.
“Vote for us and you will truly democratic! You know, like the West!”
“Cos more dissenting voices in parliament is always better, right?”

And more of the same old boring ideas:
Minimum wage as the cure all.
Extravagant government spending with no talk of higher taxation to pay for it.

Look, we just need to fire up a browser and look at how countries around the world are doing.

Just look.

What Singapore has doesn’t look like the “norm” because some folks have been innovating this little red dot out of those knots for years now.

Do you think water independence could have been had in an American context?

Look at the hoops Obama had to jump through for Obamacare. Singapore pretty much turned on a dime there.

What we have is very different.

We need to think whether drinking the koolaid of being more like the democratic world will work when the world doesn’t stick around when things falls apart.