I know I said I probably won't have time to blog till 2 weeks later. But I feel like this is important enough to put everything I have aside for a couple of minutes....
Today a friend of mine shared with me that J.B Jeyaretnam had passed away last night. He commented that he found it strange that this was NOT front page news. Instead, a piece of news that DID hit front page was regarding senior Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Balaji Sadasivan having surgery last Tuesday to remove a cancerous tumour in the colon.
Hmmm......
I confess I don't know that much about Jeyaretnam. But for someone who is really not in-tune with the political scene (and I confess I am), I know more about him than I can say about certain ministers that are currently in office. One thing that was always clear to me was J.B Jeyaretnam was not very often on the "same page" as the party in power and for that, he was heavily,heavily penalized. Despite that fact, he never cowered but continued to fight for what he believed was for the good of the country.
This is a trait not found in many of us today.
C'mon admit it. Today, whether on a professional or personal level, at one time or another most of us will choose to turn our head the other way or keep quiet even though deep down we know that something is not right because we are told that it is the politically correct thing to do.
Why go looking for trouble? Therefore, even if something seems like the right thing to do, smells like the right thing to do, feels like the right thing to do and probably IS the right thing to do, it is not done because the path to get it done is so difficult and more often than not, it is such a thankless job.
Case in point.....At work, I've seen careers of really smart, dedicated, hardworking people being stone-walled because they had a different opinion with the higher ups and voiced those opinions one too many times. It didn't matter that in the end, it turned out that those people were right because by voicing their opinions, they were deemed as challenging authorities and had therefore, unwittingly signed their "death" papers of career stagnation for as long as they stayed in that company (or their boss stay in that company for that matter).
To add to that, I've also seen certain persons who are not as bright, not as dedicated and not as hardworking as others but lasted far longer than they should in a job simply because they were a "Yes" man to their boss.
Sure.....being a Yes-man would probably always be the safest path but in my mind, a "yes" man can never really become a leader or exact change. Never mind the fact that a "Yes" man will probably hold position of power simply because he is always saying the right words at the right times, never mind if it is not true or he doesn't really know what he is talking about.
Just sheep...baaaah.
But I digress...
After reading up on Jeyaretnam online, I found myself questioning a few stuff that I had always taken for granted or simply because I was just too ignorant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.B._Jeyaretnam
I still love my country but loving it was so much easier by being ignorant....
But at the end of the day, I still won't walk the the path of ignorance....not by choice anyway.
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