Nothing more valuable than experience

Article: The Elderly CAN (not need) Help

Category: Social Issues
Source: The New Paper on Sunday, Aug 19, 2007

Article Transcript:

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is expected to touch on ageing and retiring in his National Day Rally Speech. Here's Sylvia Toh Paik Choo's take on the issues.

I was 19 when Singapore was born as a republic in 1965.
I had sold my first article (to Her World for $40) on the perils and foibles of being a teenager.
Now it is 2007, our city state is 42 and my subject is ageing and retiring
Did I see this coming? Of course not. I thought one of the beatles would marry me and we'd make music together forever in Monaco. Lucky moi.
Singapore is poised to be the Monaco of the east with the F1 GP and the IRs imminent. And two of the fab four have permanently retired to join Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
This evening - with Help! playing softly in the background in my case - we the citizens of Singapore will be all ears as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong delivers the most important political speech of the year, the National Day Rally biggie.
This NDR speech will particularly impact young and old; no guesses, one of its key thrusts will be about retiring and ageing in Singapore.
In other words, the Ah-Kong-Ah-Ma boom.
Or. How I Stopped Working (at 62) and became an Economic Burden
Here's a simplistic example:

Take a workplace like say the Istana. If MM Lee Kuan Yew and SM Goh Chok Tong were to quit gainful employment, it would leave PM Lee the one active person to support two inactive ones.
(Japan's future painful scenario has two working-age people for each retired one, Singapore's projection for 2020 is one-in-five above 60)
MM Lee and SM Goh are two of Singapore's most valuable assets in a country which as far as I can see worships youth. Take a weekday walk in the malls for confirmation.
Bright Young Things?
But look around you, most things of import have been invented or created by the not-so young. From rock 'n' roll, sex, drugs - okay not the finest example - to Apple, Java, iPod, iTunes, music, fashion, pop culture, Sun Microsystems, attitude.
Now that generation is no longer hip - hip replacements notwithstanding - what do we do with them, the greying dilemma?
From a Hollywood experience perspective, there's always the Soylent Green solution. Transform the elderly into bio-fuel. Think of the environment. Think of the factory jobs. Aiyoh, just joking only lah you!
Another option, deport the aged to retirement camps, for instance on Hainan Island. Picture the booming business in building these Club Meds (short for Club Medical). Manpower would be cheap, even with a little CPF you could lead a VIP rest-of-your-life.
And prepare for the Silver Revolution. This majority is unlikely to be silent. We are called Baby Boomers because our voice will boom; we gave birth to Attitude with a capital A. We won't go quietly. A little slower maybe, shaking the stick.
On a mature and more basic note, with our fecundity rate one of the lowest in the world, the elderly need to be kept in their jobs longer.
However fresh and dynamic for years in Kent Ridge have made you, you can't beat experience when it comes to the skills of surviving as a red dot in a large and tough world.
Besides, we need the old folks, or who's going to babysit the stories of early Singapore?
If you have read this far - without shortcutting paragraphs - thank you. It means I still have my job for the rest of today.

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Response:
It happens all the time in Singapore. Bosses ignoring the contributions that older workers have made to their company and firing them just because they think that "age has caught up with them", and they are no longer "capable enough" to contribute to our nation's economy.

It almost seems like eugenics, the way the world functions nowadays. Age has never been an indication of competency, and it never should be. That is why such a negative attitude towards the aged of our society is wrong. We may have never realised it, but the young generation can never survive without the wealth of wisdom and experience the older generation has to offer us.

Sylvia Toh brought up two major contributions of the old folk to the youth of today. Firstly, they are the ones who keep many of our cultures and past traditions alive. Chinese New Year in the past used to be a grand event where people dressed in bright red traditional outfits would pray to their ancestors and have a reunion dinner with their family where the married would give red packets to the young and the young would give mandarin oranges as a gift of prosperity to the elderly. Such events are the very epitemy of the Chinese race, yet many today do not even bother to celebrate the occasion anymore, choosing instead to use the holiday to rest or hang out with friends. Without the old folks to inculcate in the youth a sense of pride and belonging towards their own culture, we could very well see a major cultural dilution in the people of today.

Secondly, the older generation possesses a huge wealth of experience that the younger generation can learn alot from. Having lived for so many years and having been through all the times of hardship that our nation had faced before we became the prosperous country we are today, the elderly carry with them valuable lessons from the past that we must never overlook. And who's to say the elderly are unable to contribute greatly to our economy, if they were the ones who had worked so hard to bring so many of us youth to where we are today?

That is precisely why we should treat the elderly as equals. No, in fact we should respect them as our superiors, for without the amazing contributions and hard work they had put into developing the tiny fishing village Singapore used to be in the past, we the young generation would not even be where we are today. There's only one word to describe the way the elderly are treated these days. Cruel. And although I am only a teenager who might not know enough about the world to understand what it takes for someone to be considered a "competent" or "capable" person, I strongly feel that the elderly of today should be given more opportunities to play their part in the community and earn themselves a decent living.

That's what meritocracy is about, after all.

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