Hope for Life

This is the era for change

I don't want to be a bonsai tree

A teacher from RI came out in his blog a week ago claiming he is gay and had now started the whole Singapore debating on his actions.

His students are very supportive, saying 'To the outside world, the teacher is a gay person. To us, he is and always will be our teacher.'

And of course, those people who are making the most noise are the parents who know nothing abt him.

I guess this how homophobia is all about. You do not know anyone who is homosexual. Thus you fear the unknown. You alienized them and demonized them, making them the Other.

But if there is a chance that let you know someone as a friend first, and later found out that he or she is a gay, that make it a lot easier to accept the person. Because the unfamiliar becomes the familiar.

While I was watching Hairspray, I realised that we are in the exact scenerio as the blacks in USA in 1960s. They were discriminated because they were thought to be of a lower class and the white is not supposed to mix with the black. And the less you mix with them, the more these people become an unknown, and the more fear this unknown creates.

If Martin Luther King, Jr never given the world famous speech "I have a dream." Perhaps the racism felt in USA then will still be felt today.

But the world has changed and it is no longer so. The black and whites live in harmony.

And this can be the case, for heterosexual and homosexual.

It can change and this is the era for change. The internet age, the era of globalization, the era for tolerance, and then understanding. Like MM LKY said in Berita Harian, that the top 20% Singaporeans are exposed to changes and are more susceptable to change. But it is the 20% heartlanders that is more conservative and he has to make sure that progress will not be too jarring for these 20% of the people.

And perhaps, with Otto Fong's "I don't want to be a bonsai tree", Singapore may have a chance to walk towards a more tolerant and understanding future, where understanding of the once "unknown" can be reached and acceptance can finally be achieved as one, united nation.

posted by Fay @ 11:44 PM