Generation Grit Winners.

We need hope in this day and age. We need to be inspired. We need to believe again. 

Leading the charge for hope, inspiration and resilience are 25 nominees under the ST Generation Grit Award 2018. 

What these nominees have in common is that they are young, they have gone through tough times, and they emerged from it stronger with hope undimmed. 

We have Jean Tan, 33. She is “a singer-songwriter who was born with a severe cleft palate and was told she would never be able to speak properly.” She has gone to produce several albums. 

We have Jun Xiang, 22, who “went from Normal stream to studying medicine at the National University of Singapore”.

We have Yong Jie, 23, who “had a stroke at the age of 19 and was retrenched from his job later. Now he is studying to be a social worker.”

We also have a childhood cancer survivor, “she is now a national archer” (Keller Chai, 21). 

How about Hairul, who “overcame a tough childhood to graduate with First Class Honours in law” and “a top student whose parents died suddenly. His mother committed suicide, and his dad died in his sleep”? 

The list goes on and on. They will be recognised and honoured on May 6 at the National Library. 

Kudos to ST Theresa Tan for finding these exceptional individuals fighting their own fight, standing firm against the storm of doubts, and overcoming all odds to be where they are today. 

Of course, their journey has not ended. For many it has just begun. It is still a long journey. But they have a template to follow. They once overcame. Their hope once guided them. They will thus not take things for granted. 

Theresa said: “In this age of disruptions, I feel we need to tell more stories of hope, of courage, of resilience.”

Lesson? One.

Einstein once said this, “There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

In similar vein, you can live your life two ways too, as though nothing is possible, or as though everything is possible.

Miracles and possibility are two sides of the same circumstantial coin. 

When life descends into chaos, when all seems lost, and hope dims into a blur, these generation gritters (for lack of a better term) took the road less travelled and created a way for themselves. 

They focused on that which gave them hope, enduring hope, like their family, their passion, their belief in themselves, the encouragements from loved ones, their faith, and even that small sterling voice from within amidst the loud clamour to give up without. 

Of course, they have every reason to give up. Life didn’t in the first place start for them on a paved path with bed of roses on its sides and a firm hand to hold on to and guide them along the way. 

Yet, they turned that reason (to give up) into purpose, and that purpose into determination, and with every determination, it bore fruits that opened doors for them. 

We have a teen who slept at the void deck with her siblings. Zulayqha now “worked her way out of poverty to be a social work associate.” She said: “I hope that through this nomination, I can motivate and continue to inspire more millennials to contribute more to society.”

Then, we have a teen gangster who became a top student and entrepreneur (Jasper Yap, 24). And we have a “blind SIM undergraduate who teaches other visually impaired people to use tech in their daily lives.” (Chia Hong Sen, 22). 

Yes, we can always say that their circumstances differ from ours and they are not us. We can say that everybody wears their own shoes and walk their own paths, and the steps each person takes and the road he or she walks on differ in personality, timing, in circumstances, and even in luck too. 

But, say what you want, their struggles are the same. They were once just as lost as us in our own circumstances. Timing and luck have never been kind to them. 

In fact, for many of them, their paths were often very lonely and dark, and all they had was just enough light to shine on the next 

uncertain step ahead; the rest is pitch darkness. 

Mind you, this is not just a metaphor, but a lived experience, painful and heart-wrenching. 

And their personality might differ, but like all of us, nobody is stripped of the freedom to make choices along the way. 

The problem is never about making bad choices. We are all guilty of it. It is however when we refuse to make good ones that our path remains as it is, a downward spiral. 

These 25 nominees however turned their life around when they turn their choices around. 

Sure, some of them have made bad choices. Some are born with bad genes. And others are thrown into bad circumstances from the get-go.

But, they are tough not just because they lived through tough times. It is because they make tough choices, that is, choices of never giving up, choices of believing in themselves, and choices to focus on hope and not disappointments, on life and not suicide, and on embracing and transforming fear and doubts, and not being consumed by them.

So, Einstein was right about the two ways of living our life. It is essentially about perspectives. 

And just because there is a mountain before you, it doesn’t mean that there is no horizon after it. It is merely block by it. 

And for the 25 nominees, they are undeterred by their own mountains. They scaled it, overcame their circumstances, and in their own ways, stood at the top to enjoy the glorious views before them. That’s what makes these ordinary young people extraordinary.

The NZ Shooter - the face of evil?

Shanmugam said: “When you see the face of the person who was alleged to have committed the crime (terrorist attack), I think you see the face of evil.”

The law minister’s word echoed in my cerebral chamber for quite some time this morning, in particular, “I think you see the face of evil.”

I always wonder, how does the face of evil look like? 

Now, it’s easy to connect the act to the perpetrator and come to that conclusion. The trail of murdered innocent and defenceless lives, especially young children, can’t be any clearer. That’s unmistakably the foregone conclusion. 

But, if you look squarely at the NZ shooter, Brenton Tarrant, who engineered the mass shootout from day one, even authored a 74-page manifesto of the whole plan which took about 2 years, you will be hard pressed to single him out from the crowd of ethno-nationalist ecofascists. 

What makes it even harder to identify is that Brenton, 28, had no criminal record and “was not previously known to investigators who follow extremist groups.” 

He described himself as “a regular white man, from a regular family.” 

After his father, who worked as a garbageman and was a competitive triathlete, died in 2010, Brenton used his father’s inheritance money and “spent several years travelling around the world, to places where a white Australian was a distinct minority, and a white supremacist surrounded by people he considered lesser than him.”

This “regular white man” visited Pakistan and North Korea, and in a Facebook post, wrote that Pakistan was “an incredible place filled with the most earnest, kind-hearted and hospitable people in the world.” 

But this is also the same “regular white man” who declared himself as a “racist” and in his manifesto, it contained “a compendium of slogans, poems and diatribes against immigrants, Muslims, Jews and religious converts.” 

He called them “invaders...who colonise other peoples lands.” 

So, before the commission of the heinous act, if you like Shanmugam (doing a similar ”minority report” but without the three “precogs” psychics) are hunting down terrorists planning a mass shootout, you will have to look into the faces of tens of thousands of so-called “regular white men” in an identification parade to smoke that one evil racist out - and good luck with that search!

This reminded of what political theorist Hannah Arendt once observed about Adolf Eichmann, who organised the transport to send millions of Jews to the concentration camps in what Hitler called The Final Solution. 

After she saw and studied Eichmann, she came to this conclusion about the banality of evil: -

”I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.“

“Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”

In her thesis, Arendt wrote that ”Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on cliché defenses rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann's actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional.“

Lesson? ...

There is not much of a lesson to be learned here. Brenton is a right-wing extremist, a “regular white man”, and when asked about this growing threat around the world, President Trump has this to say: -

“I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. It’s certainly a terrible thing.”

Yes, it is certainly a terrible thing...

And it is rather unfortunate that the commander-in-chief of the current global order doesn’t appear to know how evil like that of Brenton‘s was incubated, encouraged, empowered and launched with complete senseless carnage. 

It cannot be denied that acts like that of Brenton’s do not stand alone or exists in a social, political or ideological vacuum. 

Brenton in fact wrote that his aim was to “defend our lands from invaders, to reduce immigration rates and to deepen division and start a civil war in the United States.” 

And the statistics are stark on this. “The fact is right-wing extremists collectively have been responsible for more than 70 per cent of the 427 extremist-related killings over the past 10 years, far outnumbering those committed by left-wing extremists or domestic Islamic extremists” (Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League).

This whole evil process that leads to the deranged psychology of mass killing is what some political scientists call dehumanization. And the words of Aldous Huxley put it most aptly about the role national propaganda (like the one Trump unwittingly represents) plays in this dehumanisation process: -

“Most people would hesitate to torture or kill a human being like themselves. But when that human being is spoken of as though he were not a human being, but as the representative of some wicked principle, we lose our scruples...All political and nationalist propaganda aims at only one thing; to persuade one set of people that another set of people are not really human and that it is therefore legitimate to rob, swindle, and even murder them.”

Here, recall that Brenton did say that immigrants were “invaders...who colonies other peoples lands.” 

The word “invasion” ought to sound quite familiar to most of us by now. If a cryptic metaphor helps, here goes: For a fire at the top of the pyre is always more visible, even miles away, as compared to an isolated spark on the ground, right?

But, be that as it may, let me end this post not with dehumanization, but heroes, heroes of humanity. They too are regular men who confront evil in the face and never flinched. In fact, they are prepared to give their lives to save others, even strangers. 

Our first hero is Adeeb Sami, 52 yrs old. 

He is a father of twin children and he came to NZ with them to celebrate their birthday. It was supposed to be a surprise. 

Alas, the surprise turned into horror when Mr Sami “ended up in surgery to have a bullet removed from his spine after he dove in front of his two sons to protect them from the gunman who stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch last Friday.”

His daughter said: “My dad is a real hero. He got shot in the back near his spine in an attempt to shield my brothers but he didn’t let anything happen to them.” 

Another hero is Mr Naeem Rashid, 50 yrs old. He was a teacher.

“The video of the shooting shows Mr Rashid approaching and trying to stop the gunman, who opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon.” 

This is what his sister-in-law said: “When Rashid attacked him, he shot him. Our Imam, I think he saw him, he said his face was towards the sky, and he didn’t know whether he was dead or not.”

Yet, another hero (among many) is an unnamed young man. 

One eyewitness saw him tackling the gunman. “The young guy who usually takes care of the mosque...he saw an opportunity and pounced on (gunman) and took his gun. The hero tried to chase and he couldn’t find the trigger in the gun...he ran behind him but there were people waiting for him in the car and he (gunman) fled.” 

Now, heroes come in many forms too. When something like this happens, the community of love and compassion comes together, and at this moment, across NZ, the crowdfunding effort has raised NZ$3.2 million within 24 hours of the shootings. 

In one Facebook post, a Wellington native Ms Lianess Howard wrote: “If any Muslim women in Wellington feel unsafe right now - I will walk with you, wait at the bus stop with you, I’ll sit on the bus with you, or walk with you while you do the groceries.”

Pausing for thought, I feel that there is no better way to end this post than allowing heroes above to bring it home. 

While dehumanisation is the process of reducing a human being into a category of subhuman to be hated, the acts and words of the heroes above effectively arrest that process and transform it into spontaneous acts of upholding and uplifting a soul into a community of unconditional love, sacrifice and hope. 

And while we cannot with certainty identify the face of evil in a crowd, we can always know with anchored assurance that when evil washes over, love will raise a mighty tide to douse, quench and crush it.

For where evil rears its ugly head, love will break the neck that supports it. And where evil takes the first strike, love is there to heal the wounds, raise broken spirits, and restore hearts with greater strength than before. 

Love thus not only overcomes, it also prevails in the community with resilience and hope. Amen.

The Cancel Culture - the loss of the right to be erased.

A law professor of Yale University, Stephen L. Carter, has written a sobering and thoughtful article entitled “Michael Jackson and cancel culture’s dilemma.”

Stephen defines “cancel culture” as this: -

“At its heart, the term refers to editing one’s own awareness of the world of popular culture, to eliminate from active consciousness the works of those who have been credibly accused of doing terrible things to other people - particularly when they have faced few or no legal consequences.”

Now, I can understand why there is the urge to do this, that is, to erase from digital consciousness those who have committed heinous crimes like sexual abuses against defenceless victims without facing legal consequences for their actions because of the lack of evidence, private settlements or their passing away before the trial could commence. 

From their perspective, the victim’s cry for justice may justify the offender’s obliteration. One journalist, Ms Amanda Marcotte wrote: -

“We can’t make them go to jail, the thinking goes, but we can take them off our screens and out of our headphones. It’s an attempt to assert control over a situation where victims and their allies often have none.”

But in today’s article, after all considered, Stephen felt that this is an individual choice and the same cannot be applied across the board. 

He wrote: “Can the Music of Michael Jackson and R. Kelly be cancelled?” This cancel culture at its best: an appeal at once to the individual’s conscience and aesthetic sensibility. The effort is not to force anyone’s judgment on anyone else; rather, the effort is to discipline the self to set aside an affinity for that which is now tainted.””

He added: “History teaches that “no one should have access to the things I hate” is a dangerous claim. Better by far to leave the choice to the individual.””

Lesson? One. 

Personally, I still listen to some of Michael Jackson’s songs, especially “You are not alone”. That song carries much nostalgia for me. 

When I was in London more than 20 years ago, separated from my future wife, that song kept alive the bond we had at that time. It refreshed the passion when it was played. In other words, it kept a longing and aching heart beating steadfastly until we met again. 

Michael Jackson was not perfect, and for some, he was a sex offender. But his works have given much comfort and strength to many all over the world. 

Black or white, Billie Jean, Man in the Mirror, Earth Song and Heal the World are compositions that have defined a pop cultural era and even remade the world of music and art as we know it. The lyrics together with the music inspired many, emboldened their spirit and transformed hearts. 

Stephen wrote this about MJ’s iconic album Thriller: “The song and the video not only rescued a moribund music industry but arguably brought black music back firmly into a mainstream that was in the process of shoving it to the margins.”

“We can choose never again to listen to his music, but it would be a terrible wrong to pretend that his influence was less than it was.”

Stephen added: “I’m not arguing for a particular solution to the problem of who should watch or listen to what. I’m arguing only that we leave the judgment to individual fans - in that sense, that we let the market decide.”

Alas, it is important that we think for ourselves as a rational, soul searching individual. Technology may influence us, nudge us or challenge us, but it would be wrong to allow it to think for us.

When it comes to the works by tainted artists, are their works tainted too? Is there nothing redeemable about their works? 

Is this then a case of the Midas touch working in reverse, whereby whatever they have touched, their music, their films, would likewise not see the light of day? Have we considered that by boycotting their works, we may be throwing the bathwater out with the baby? 

I feel that it is always justified for those the artist had gravely hurt to edit him and his works out of their mind and sight. I sincerely respect their choice. 

I can never imagine the pain they have to go through even when the offender, however talented, has passed on. That may just be the victims’ way of dealing with an injustice that has sadly lost her way. 

And that is why Amanda (the journalist) said that the appeal of the cancel culture (albeit “an incoherent and inadequate response to sexual abuse”) lies in the lack of alternatives. “People turn to it because real justice is elusive.”

But talent does not mean perfection. If a good song or film is composed/directed by a human being, you can always expect him (or her) to be far from perfect. 

If you take Harvey Weinstein, for example, his tainted creative fingerprints are everywhere, which included Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare In Love, and the movie I loved, Good Will Hunting. 

Should I then denounce and ban them just because a credibly guilty sexual abuser had produced and financed those films?

Well, ultimately, Stephen is right. It is up to the individual, up to me. I have to decide. I have to make up my mind. My consult is with my conscience and my decision with my conviction. 

As a professed rational, soul-searching individual, I should never allow the indiscriminate erasure of the cancel culture to mentally lobotomise me. Maturity in thought is about having the courage to think not just out of the box, but away from the blind and unhinged forces of the crowd. 

I know in today’s social media culture, this may be a genuine struggle. Technology aims to manipulate us, exploit our differences, polarise us, and promise us a mental rose garden of carefree thinking by doing the heavy mental lifting for us. 

But that is what we are called to fight against, that is, the uniformalising and levelling forces of technology, which strives to make each of us a standard issue. 

By reason of the above, the urgent call to own and take responsibility for our autonomy, conscience and conviction will be the new battleline in our modern society. 

And I hope we will be able to resist its indiscriminate flow for the quiet stream nearby where we can not only be ourselves, but to critically think for ourselves too. Cheerz.

My strange dream: A church without walls.

I had a strange dream last night. 

I dreamt I went into a church that has no walls. Literally, no walls. No joke. As there were no doors, I walked in at any point I fancied. 

In the dream, I recalled I stood marvelling at a church that has no door signs telling you where the entrances and exits were. They are in fact everywhere in a church that has no walls. You are thus free to enter and exit whenever and wherever you like. 

Another strange thing is this: as I stepped into the church, everyone is transparent. Yes, you heard me right. There was nothing to hide. You can’t hide anything. You didn’t need to. 

And in case you’re wondering, no, they‘re not in their baby suits. They are just open, vulnerable, most times, broken. 

You can read them the same way you read a book, but with one difference: the embellished cover is the last thing you will see about them. It’s their written story that is displayed for all to read or see, and nothing else. 

So, you can’t just judge them by the cover. By first glance. By their dressing. By a convenient stereotype. By a rule of thumb. There is just no cover to speak of in the first place. In fact, the cover is their whole story; at least the part that tells the story you are free to read. 

And you can’t hurry it. The reading and understanding takes time. An encounter is not just an exchange of pleasantries, but an exchange of experiences - intimate and personal ones. 

And you can’t help it too, because every encounter draws you in. It’s difficult to resist. You can‘t say hi-and-bye just like that. You will be immediately drawn in by their life’s story. 

You will come to know their pain, their joy, their tears and their hopes. You will come to know what they have been through, where they are now, the struggles they are in, and for many, the little victories they had won along the way. 

Their journey may not be complete, but at least you will get to know what made them who they are and why they are who they are. 

In other words, their lives thus far regardless of age are their stories, an open book, and you get to read the most intimate part of it. They have left nothing important in their lives unsaid so that you would know them not superficially, but in depth, in detail, and in context. 

There is therefore no room for second guessing, pigeonholing or stereotyping. No room for unwarranted judgment and baseless gossiping. You will be compelled to see them as a whole, not just a snapshot, a fractured fraction; not just a shadow of the real person. 

To be honest, at this part of my dream, I teared. I could feel a drop or two rolling down my cheek because every story of the people I meet in this peculiar church with no walls were heart breaking and heart moving at the same time. 

I read about their cries at night, all alone by themselves. I read about their struggles for identity, for attention, for parental approval, even those who were parents themselves, and for hope in the midst of a loveless marriage, a broken sibling relationship, and a tormenting voice urging them to end it all. 

At the same time, I experienced a surge in my spirit when I read about how many of them overcame their own circumstances. 

I also read about how they found joy in the midst of pain, how they persevered in hope in the midst of disappointments, and how they were transformed to be wounded healers in a community of wounded souls they have come to identify with and were determined to overcome together as a family. 

In my dream within a dream, I saw the image of many in pitch darkness for a terrifying moment, and then one precarious candle lit up at a far corner. That took great courage, but it was hardly visible. It was still vulnerable. It risks being snuff out at a moment’s breath. Yet, it floated hope, even if it was a whit, a speck. 

Before long, the candle’s light and warmth was passed on. From one to two to four to ten. The light brightened, the warmth deepened, the reservoir of hope rose. 

Soon, what was pitch darkness could not contain the rich brightness. Gradually, darkness gave way to light, and for me, what unfolded was a community of enduring love and faith as the last candle received the light that burnt ever so brightly in a place that was once invisible to all. 

Alas, this is a church with no walls. But I did not mingle long as I came to a sudden awakening. I opened my eyes and knew it was a dream. 

And like all dreams, it is not reality, at least not yet?