my next commentary

“In violence, we forget who we are.” We forget who we are because our spirit is engulfed by it, and what we do is often hard to explain and harder to get away with. In violence, we lose everything.

Perhaps someone should have told these three men exactly that last year. Mr. Seow was a businessman running a shop at Golden Landmark Shopping Complex, Mr. Low his assistant; and finally Mr. Wong, a regular customer of the abovementioned shop. Following a dispute between Mr. Low and Mr. Goh, a total stranger on the street, they attacked this man together with a can of pepper spray when he returned to the shopping mall. They managed to blind and severely hurt the victim, along with spreading the pepper spray into the building’s air circulation vents and hurting the people in side as well. Quite a feat for three middle-aged men in shorts.

Yet we must look through the façade of a Singaporean-styled gang attack to what this really means for our society. I can only speak for myself, but I am disturbed by what this attack means for us Singaporeans. We usually hear about such assaults in countries such as the U.S, half the world from where we are. It turns out that immature men such as these three do exist in our country, men who are unafraid to make use of violence aggressively. Having grown up in a paradigm where Singapore has been a safe and peaceful society to live in, I cannot help but feel that this streak in our society must be ironed out.

And it must be said that such organized crime is radically different from thefts or movie piracy, other issues we would like to concern ourselves with at the moment. This form of assault is a directed, concerted attempt to use force to deliberately harm a human being, for no apparent reason but retaliation and self-satisfaction. We cannot condone these attacks on anyone in our society. Period.

I’d like to believe that the sadistic motivation of the assault has made you pretty disgusted thus far, so maybe let’s talk about the law. Naturally, committing an attack on anyone is a crime, listed under assault. Yet perhaps it is unknown to you that the use of pepper spray in Singapore is illegal, as listed under the Corrosive and Explosive Substances and Offensive Weapons Act. We could see well why in this case; the rather inconsiderate use of the spray entered the ventilation system of the nearby building and contaminated it, causing much pain to people within. And since these people are really quite innocent in all this, it’s clear that these weapons should stay illegal.

So now that these men have been brought to court, one could say that the ending is quite a happy one. To stop the wrong weapons from falling into the wrong hands, we’ve managed to illegalize the former and criminalize the latter. But perhaps there is one more lesson to be learnt here. I personally believe that the victim was partially responsible for his own misfortune. In Singapore, where I come from, there is usually an emphasis on the idea of being ‘street-smart’, or in other words, not being intellectually gifted alone but with the ability to keep yourself out of trouble in, well, the streets. Angering someone you don’t know only gives them the incentive to get back at you, and they certainly can do so in painful ways, as we’ve seen in this instance.

Isaac Asimov once said, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Let us strive not to be incompetent, or the victims of the incompetent. That should be what we realize from this disaster.