Hot, Hotter, Hottest

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In tropical Singapore we used to joke that we had four seasons, just like any temperate country, except that our seasons were hot, hotter, hottest, and shopping, which was all-year round. Underneath the joke is a tragic truth: the rapid economic development of Singapore, together with its urban transformation of the island, has desensitized us to the trade winds and the monsoons of the region. More, it has desensitized us to the dismantling of our basic human rights, free speech, free assembly, free and fair elections. Climate change in Singapore—not just rises in temperature but also more frequent flooding—has also been social and political.

Jolene Tan, whose compelling essay "Out of the Well," kicks off our month-long series of writings on the theme of climate change, puts it this way: "... on this island, we enact routines especially distant from any self-sustaining equilibrium, requiring a high frequency and intensity of intervention to maintain. Moment-to-moment we strain against competing tendencies: cooling the air heated by the equatorial sun, cutting the grass and trees that grow, clearing away homes set up by animals. Autonomous phenomena are cut off over and over. And we mobilise a staggering amount of material, from incredibly far away, to fuel the Singapore machine—to feed, clothe and supply its peoples every day."

When autonomous human phenomena, such as independent journalist Kirsten Han, sound the alarm, they are cut off too. In the past two weeks Kirsten Han and a group of concerned Singaporeans mounted a petition against the government's Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act, because FICA grants overly broad and vaguely defined powers to the government that can be used to suppress civil society and legitimate dissent. A Singapore law professor described the law as having "the makings of being the most intrusive law on the statute books." In the parliamentary debate on the Bill last Monday, Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam repeated his smears against Han, which Han had already denied in the past. The debate is a very troubling preview of how the law may be used against anyone that the government designates as "a politically significant person" in its opinion and so proscribes.

The image of the frog escaping the well in Jolene Tan's essay reminds me of another frog story. You will know it. Enscounced in a pot of water that is very slowly heated, the creature does not realize that it is being boiled alive. By and large, Singaporeans think that they are about to have a delicious meal of frog. They have yet to realize that, in the rising temperatures of hot, hotter, hottest, they are the meal.

Jee Leong Koh
October 7, 2021

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