By 
COMMENT
Outrage. File a police report. He should be investigated under the Sedition Act.These were the reactions in the immediate aftermath of the uproar over a racially inflammatory photo posted by a certain Jason Neo who co-incidentally is a member of the Young People’s Action Party. He has since resigned.
First, one should remain calm. Comments by a single person do not sum up those of a community, much less the political party involved.
Mistakes happen, and the only thing one can do is apologise.
I also can’t help wondering whether the level of outrage would be the same if it was a member of the Workers’ Party or the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) -- but that is for another day.
But as I pored through the barrage of comments after the photo went viral, what I found more surprising and alarming is that not a single one offered to reach out to this Jason Neo and clear the perception or lack of information that he might have about my religion.
What scares me even more is how many others are thinking the same thing, unspoken but nevertheless felt and thought. Which brings me to wonder, just how multicultural are we?
In a recent interview with The Straits Times last week, National University of Singapore professor Syed Farid Alatas said the word means cultures merely co-exist in Singapore and that contrary to public perception, we have yet to be “truly” multicultural and that the various races here do not yet have a genuine understanding of each other’s history and culture.
Last Saturday, the same paper also published a Forum letter – in response to the article – by Virdi Bhupinder, a former expatriate of North Indian heritage who had first moved to Singapore 16 years ago and has since taken up citizenship.
Apart from noting that his Singaporean neighbours have failed to make any effort to learn more about his culture, his casual greetings to neighbours were returned with cold stares. Echoing professor Alatas, he said “throwing in” people from different races do not create a multicultural society.
While what followed was the inevitable criticism by Singaporeans that said expatriates too should play their part to integrate with local society, surely the observations by both the professor and the forum letter writer begs us as a society to think harder: Are we truly integrated as one people?
Time and again we need to take a good, hard look at ourselves. We constantly need to ask the hard questions, "Are we doing things right?", "What more can be done?".
In his book "Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going", former Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said that he does not see intolerance within the society.
“Every Singaporean knows the first ingredient, the first attribute we must have to be successful multiracial, cosmopolitan society, is a high degree of tolerance,” he said.
But I argue that it is time we do more and move past the phase of just tolerance, a term which might well represent a broad and superficial layer of multiculturalism. Professor Alatas said that beneath the word tolerance is “irritation, lack of interest, certainly not admiration” and that it is not a good fundamental to build sustainable peace and harmony.
I too am guilty of not doing more. Half of my closest friends are Chinese and I recently found out that one of them had converted from Christianity to Buddhism. He did not tell me about it and neither did I bother to ask.
The bottom line is, we spend most of our lives so caught up in our career and own lives that we conveniently skirt around the religious issue and what it really means to be Muslim or Buddhist or Christian or Hindu.
Perhaps, consciously or sub-consciously we choose not to talk about religion because it's convenient to make assumptions and not bother about inconvenient truths.
The same can be said for all this talk about the influx of foreigners and what I fear is the increasingly xenophobic and frankly racist stuff I hear about mainland Chinese or Indians.
Therefore, I acknowledge the need to take the bold step of facing up to our differences and not be apprehensive to debate about it. After all that’s what being a modern, intellectual state is all about.
It is not about who’s right or wrong, whose faith is superior because we can still walk away from such dialogues with our beliefs intact but having gained a genuine understanding of respective cultures and religions.
The onus, now and always, will be on us, not the government or inter-faith organisations, to dig deeper and reach that stage of understanding. So, instead of posting a barrage of angry comments over the photo, why don’t you use the time to reflect on what you can do better? Or maybe, just maybe, contact Jason Neo and have coffee over this topic.
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