Suffer The Little Children

Don't mix up Hong Lim with Hong Kong

Right on cue, the mute button was toggled off. Politicians who stood idly by and played dumb for weeks while a 87 year old pioneer generation member was in grave danger of being robbed and pillaged by a foreign intruder were suddenly jostling to leap into a feeding frenzy. Note the common thread in the cacophony of protestations:

Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin:
"I am appalled. We now hecklespecial needs children? Vile. Total and absolute disgrace."
Social and Family Development Minister Chan Chun Sing:
"To cause alarm and distress to special needs children, and disrupting their routine cannot be right no matter how righteous you think your own cause may be. "
MP Janil Puthucheary:
"No excuse for bad behaviour, but especially not directed at kids."
MP Zaqy Mohamad: 
"A pity that special needs children were heckled by protesters at event by YMCA at Hong Lim Park."
MP Ang Wei Neng:
"There was no good reason for the bloggers to hecklechildrenwith special needs and hurl vulgarities."
MP Denise Phua:
"I heard while the kids were not physically harmed, many were alarmed, confused and disturbed by the unexpected unruly turn of events."
MP Tin Pei Ling:
“What have these special needs children done to deserve being heckled down?”

You know brains have left the building when "Return our CPF" is construed as a phrase to "heckle" special needs children - unless the folks withholding our CPF are certified retards in the medical sense. Why did MP Teo Ser Luck, supposedly a "fixture" at the YMCA event (or NParks director Chia Seng Jiang who set the stage for a potent mix), insert the vulnerable kids into a crossfire of political ploy? A bit of history is enlightening:

"At about 10.35 pm that first evening (circa 1955), a mob had attacked a police patrol car with a British police lieutenant in charge, hurling bottles and stones as they closed in for the kill...
He was not aiming at the crowd, he said, but one shot appeared to have hit a Chinese student of about 17. Instead of taking him straight to hospital, however, the other students put him on a lorry and paraded him around the town for three hours, so that by the time he was brought there he was dead from a wound in the lung. Had he been taken to hospital directly, he might have been saved. But what was one life if another martyr could stoke up the fire of revolution?" ("The Singapore Story", page 203)

It is doubtful that any grassroots leader, however rabid his card-carrying convictions, is prepared to be martyred and paraded around Hong Lim Green. The collateral damage will have to be borne by somebody else. History will revisit this episode and determine if the YMCA is just another gullible partisan NGO.