musings #01
Sunday, December 9, 2007
the way i see it, war is all part of a greater being's (god, maybe) of balancing out the populations that inhabit the world. with the advent of longer lifespans and more humans, faster killing machines are thought up. crimes in this century, murders and such are unaviodable as a whole. the only thing one can hope is not to be the target of such tradgedies. i do believe that somewhere sometime there will be a third world war, where even more killing will take place. people are highly territorial and will need to kill to defend their turf. everything must happen with a consequence.
when i did a survey in secondary three or two, a question was asked, would i take up arms to defend singapore should the need arise? i put a resounding yes. of course, im not exactly a patriot. i just feel familiar with the concept of defending one's homeland. yet when i went to recent outings such as AOH07 and paintball, i found myself questioning my projected capabilities of a soldier in real-time warfare. see, my constant thought was that i had found myself a more or less protected piece of cover. good. i can shoot people from here fine, so dont make me move. ill move from this spot when i think there is less criss-crossing fire. when i think conditions are safe. well, if i have this mentality for such trival situations, what with war? will i end up like those troops we see in movies, to afraid to boldly move forward in the face of suppressive fire, too afraid that my life will be cut short? i read once that under suppressive fire, one MUST move. to not move is even more dangerous, what with possible flanking and a laying down of concentrated suppressive fire once the enemy sees you are pinned, to keep you pinned. moving renders the mg useless when you fall out of his mg scope, until the guy repositions or sends follow up units.
so will i be such a soldier? there is a proverbial saying that those who are very gung ho in peacetime really end up cowards in war. those who have remained quiet and steadfast all their military careers will rise to the occasion and show his or her true spirit. it is only cliche because it has been repeated time and time again.
i changed my title just now so it can reflect the change of tack that i am about to make. i hate titles anyway. the only reason i have them is so that the archives wont seem so messy. but a blog is akin to a diary, and no one writes about just one thing and context for every entry in a real diary. In any case, let me continue. I was recently blog surfing again, and i happened to chance across th famous Xiaxue's blog. i read the latest post and felt utterly disgusted. for heaven's sake it was a sad attempt of a blatant advertising of som dang restaurant. Now i wont be idiotic here, i know that being famous means people pay for your endorsements of their products and the like. but when i read a personal blog i want to know what is affecting or going on in someone's life. there are blogs that even companies have, that are simply areas to put up advertising and recent corporate events. but these are designated special case blogs, one only reads them to know about a company or such. I sincerely feel that personal blogs cannot lose their flavour by selling themselves out. both adsense ads and simple thumbs up's' to a nice day at a shop or restaurant are fine, one is not personal endorsement while the latter is still a true-to-journal recount of a genuine experience.
Continuing, i decided to treat the post as one-off. i proceeded to read on to other posts. but lo and behold, the little turd is no different from stereotypical singaporean teen girl blogs where one oftens substitutes the english language for something else totally irrelavant. i found the posts boring and so teen-like, something i didnt expect for a celebrated blogger. what differs her from the vast incoherent babble of many (but not all) teen girls and their rubbish blogs? but i must state that i do have my opinions, and so do you. i respect that some adore her blog (maybe the girls in question), sharing the same interest. i present a biased view, but this is my blog after all, so i write what i think (yet keeping a boundary to many off limits topics and certain musings heheh), but like yichen said, im not asking you to f*** off if you dont like it. no eff off button here, just so you know i am a coherent, sensible singaporean teen. Wha. long post.
posted by joseph at 5:44 PM