Saturday, December 16, 2006

... and I know it makes no sense...

I refer to an article I read in the Straits Times a week back, it was something about elitism and how the so-called "middle class" in Singapore were feeling resentful towards the so-called "elites" in Singapore, something about how we always think that we deserve better treatment.
Upon reading that article, I seriously felt resentful myself.

My first thoughts were, "who are they to resent us? We worked for what we have, we're better than them. That's true, so why should we have to hide it?"

The truth is, we're too different from them. We have been groomed since young to believe that we're the best, and from that, we have always strived to achived perfection. Our peers influenced us, and we're heavily influenced by the west. We're overachievers in other words. We are the future leaders of Singapore.

I mean, come on, think about it, how can some common kid from a neighbourhood school govern Singapore the way that kids from Independant/Private schoools can?
But then again, we're getting old. In another 5 more years, we'll be 20 and flying away from our nests. I wonder, how many of us will actually consider basing our careers in Singapore?
I know I won't.

Living in Singapore has always been an option for me, but living overseas has always been in the back of my mind. Hovering. And as each year passes, and as I continually grow older by the second, it becomes clearer, and it starts pulling me towards it. It becomes more of a "I want" instead of a "I don't want".

Going off to a college in the european regions, and then landing a job as a newspaper or magazine editor in America has always been a plan that I roughly thought I'd pursue, never something in the asian region, and yet...
Now, I find that the future is in Asia.

Growing up as a kid, it was always "America, America, America". I was brought up with the mindset that if you're not "american" enough, you'll never make it big, how wrong I was.
The future is in Shanghai, or Fuzhou, or Singapore. Shanghai is still a developing country, and there are many major developments in Fuzhou, and in Singapore, what with the IR, it will be my peers who will be running it.

It suddenly hits me, and I'm just sitting here and thinking, "omigawd.
"WE'RE THE LEADERS OF TOMORROW. WE ARE THE FUTURE."
And we're so underprepared, so pampered and spoilt and so... Immature. All we really care about is "me, my friends, shopping, my phone, my computer, me, my hair, my clothes, me, what's in, what's not, who's in, who's not, the latest gossip, me".
And it seems like, there's a lot of "me" inside what we care about. We don't care about the economy, we don't care about our futures, we don't care about anything other than our own tiny little universes.

It has never occurred to us that we might not be able to get into the university of our choice yet, and that in life, we won't always have the best. We only lean back onto our parents money, and yet we're called the "elites of singapore society"?

How can we be considered elites when we don't behave like them?
We go to the best schools in singapore (ACJC, ACSIndependant, ACSBarker Road, MGS, RJC, Raffles Institution, RGS, Hwa Chong Junior College, Nanyang, Hwa Chong, SJI, St. Andrews, SCGS) and yet we behave more and more like those children whom we secretly thihnk we're superior to. Yet, what do we have in us that makes us superior to them?
In the end, it is still our parents' money that we fall back on. This is the society that has raised us and groomed elitism into us, and yet, we're all planning to fly far, far away from here, how fair is that?

There is alot of resentment towards us, but we know it's just sour grapes, we know that, and yet we still flaunt our positions in front of them. Does it mean that just because we come from "branded schools" we can behave the way that we do now, spoilt brats?

Or is it time for us to step up, and show the rest of the so-called "singapore society" just why exactly, we're called the elites and not them.

Posted by Char at 12:14 AM