Response to Garota's post

you might need to read Garota's post (coming of age) to make sense of what i'm writing here:

the same issue is happening the world over, in varying degrees. the world is a shit place. it has always been. and as Thomas Jefferson put it very aptly, experience hath shewn that man is more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the systems to which they are accustomed to. Christ will always get cruxified, Galileo will always be excommunicated. truth will always be ridiculed and persecuted with a vengenece before being accepted.

but someone has to do it. someone has to be willing to buck the trend, fight the tide, hopeless and pointless as it may seem, sacrificing one's life if needed. someone has to be willing to be that sacrificial lamb. so my question, perhaps challenge to you is, yes, you make very valid points, we all know what's wrong. do we DARE to do anything about it? are we WILLING to do anything about it? or are we going to complain about the inadequacies of our society and use these complaints as an excuse to leave? or are we going to know these inadequacies and stay to change them?

i love my country. no doubt about it. i hate some of the things that happen here. but running a country is not easy. there are a thousand and one concerns. no, i'm not an apologist for the government. but we must appreciate that there are certain things that we do not see at our level. and there are things that we see that they don't at their level. it thus becomes our responsibility to bring it up to them and convince them that these are important things that they should see.

ask ourselves something though, do we believe that our government has good intentions? i believe they do (i'm not just saying this because i believe that ISD is monitoring my blog... but because i truly believe in it...). in that case, it's a matter of convincing them that we also have the intentions of our nation at heart when we speak up. make no mistakes about it. this is by no means an easy task. but it is our duty as citizens to do so. so it's about making a value proposition, presenting a well argued cost and benefits analysis.

yes. i agree with you that we should not be contented with just the mediocrities of life, of just having 2.3 kids, and 3-room flats and all. but it's only human to want to have at least the basic necessitites of life of food, shelter, etc. the point is to be able to have the option of looking beyond these basic necessities and have hope for achieving a higher purpose.

yes. life is more than just rational choices. it is also about emotions. but we cannot just run a country based on emotions. see what Hitler managed to do... or Ghandi (yes, he managed to deliver India from British Imperialist rule, but into 5 decades of poverty. i.e. emotions without clear thinking can lead to much suffering). what are the alternatives? let's look at them, consider the emotions and eventually make the decisions and live with these decisions, tweaking (or overhauling) them as we go along

but back to the most important (in my opinion) point of this post. with all the things that we are commenting/complaining about our nation, are we going to say, "chuck it. this place is fucked-up. i'm out of here." or are we going to say, "this place is so fucked up now. but i love this place. and because i love this place, i'm going to stay to make it better, regardless."?

garota, i hope your response will be similar to the latter one.