PAP candidate Brigadier-General Tan Chuan Jin had his introductory photo shoot on the floating platform at Marina Bay because it held "fond memories of the time he organised the National Day parade". Organizing a parade for 27,000 spectators must have been a proud achievement for him.
Tonight, I went to a another parade, the Workers Party rally at Bedok Stadium. I estimated the attendees for the night to be about 30,000, given that the stands were completely packed and the track and field were almost completely filled with people, sitting or standing. The actual numbers are not important. If you have a more accurate count I will update it here.
Everyone entering or leaving had to go through four bottleneck entrances on the western side of the stadium. Throughout the night, there were long queues of people moving slowly and patiently, some coming in, some going out.
What struck me was a number of things missing at this rally. Cynicism was absent. Sarcarsm was lacking. Contrived applause was missing. And absent was also any B-General to manage the crowd.
The people were genuinely interested and eager to hear something. The audience was of all stripes, shapes and sizes. Crowd response was spontaneous and courteous. Applause after applause was warm and natural.
The crowd was massive, of the scale where, on a different occasion, a single angry remark could cause a disastrous stampede.
This event goes to show how some authentic content and a common purpose can drive a crowd, unscripted and unrehearsed, toward the behavior you would exactly desire.
In contrast, we all know the NDP consists of lots of students and soldiers gang-pressed into rehearsing Sunday after Sunday after Sunday months before the parade. I was also in a military parade where the audience, all 50,000 of us, were made to rehearse getting to our seats at the National Stadium, and then getting out again, not once, but on two separate weekends before the actual parade. After the fall of the Soviet Union, only two countries hold such parades anymore: North Korea and Singapore. OK, I exaggerate a bit. But the NDP and Workers Rally make me think about how far our bureaucrats have become detached from reality. They are deluded by their own worldview, thinking but not realizing that they have a monopoly over all problems and solutions.
The speeches at the rally drew lots of approval from the crowd. I will not go into what the rally speeches were about tonight. No one outside of government can speak on anything substantial about governing when all government information is carpet-bombed with red stamps of SECRET. The PAP does not have to worry about the speeches made tonight. But the PAP might want to be concerned about the state of football field after the rally.
This is the football field at 10.10pm as the crowd was making their way out of the stadium.
There were no cleaners on duty tonight.
And this was the parade ground after an NDP organized by a B-general:
ST copyright to picture prevents picture from being shown, but just imagine a picture of a place where a tornado has just swept past.
