I'm a bit lost. The past month has really just whizzedzoomedsped past, and a great deal of my energy has been pouring outoutout into the campaign to try and save Van. I need to sit down and take stock. This has been the campaign for Van thus far:
- setting up the online petition
- designing the flyers and then zapping and folding them with the help of Tony and some of the 05S34 kids
- organising the flyer distribution campaign
- distributing flyers with Jacob at Orchard Road, with Elaine and Jeremiah at NUS, with Jacob and Jan and Jon Koh at Raffles City, and then the big bash again outside Centrepoint
- helping out with the forum - getting posters done and zapped, getting people to go down and support
- scanning lots of hand tracings with James' help, setting up a Flickr account, uploading the pix, and then having to do the whole thing over from scratch again!
- setting up the stophanging blog (cos Uncle Yap's campaign blog was really hopeless!) and learning how to use audioblog and networking with Niraj from Pilot n' Jo
- maintaining the online forum (i can't believe there are jerks out there who will post comments like 'hang the bastard'...well, I don't need to believe it...now I'm older and wiser and I know they exist)
- writing letters - of appeal (to Lee Hsien Loong and President Nathan) and to challenge puerile arguments raised by those in favour of the death penalty - Huei Huei's not-very-nice-to-activism article, Siow 'little-miss-nationalism' Jia Rui's letter, MFA red herring reply to Philip Alston, and then the reply to one of its directors who wrote to me, Dr. Loo Choon Yong's 'sacrifice-one-for-the-many' letter to the Australian parliament
- meeting Matija together with Lucy Davis and then attending the opening of La Salle's Urban/Non-Urban exhibition (and goodness, what a right regular controversy that generated).
Gosh. And then there's also been PW OP prep (and now the GPF assessment), the 05S34 chalet (sigh...I feel so bad about sleeping through most of that), getting the 2006 school diary going, and also planning for Subjectif (well, that's the working title for the VJC blog till someone thinks of something better).
And of course the emotional turmoil occasioned by Aaron Goh, the police officer who just kind of hung up on me - literally. Sigh. I so hate it when people tell me they want intellectual challenge, and when I give it to them, they rabbit. Silly little rabbit, don't you ever learn?
I haven't been very nice to my friends, I think. I've been living, breathing, dreaming death penalty for about a month - most of the emails that I've forwarded to them have been about the death penalty. Am I disappointed with them? Hmm...yes and no...I think when I'm most myself I understand why they can't or won't get involved in a deeper way - other battles, other issues, safety and security, the list goes on. But when I'm distracted to pieces and in need of validation and support - that's when I wonder why I find myself fighting so many battles in life alone, and that's when I want to run away from it all.
And yet, in all honesty, it's been a tremendous period of learning and the best kind of self-discovery. I've had to process a great deal of fear about how my actions might be judged and dealt with, and because of that, have had a kind of political 'coming-out', although I hesitate to term it that. It's that deep realisation of just how the media is used by the state, and how profound the media's influence can be. I used to think that it was just about advertising - how we're all suckers for Nike shoes - but now I see that it's the news as well - and how the withholding of information can be as crucial as any piece of news that's actually presented.
Most of all, I'm beginning to crystallise my own values and my sense of what's important in this life. I just can't see much point (at this point) to, for instance, the research route that James wants to go down. I think it must mean quite a lot to him, because he's been urging me repeatedly to commit to presenting some papers etc. but I really can't say I want to.
What *do* I want to do then? I don't know...I'll keep listening.
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