Confession

While my official rhetoric goes that I am affronted and even enraged by the injustices and partiality against those who are born below the rungs of a certain social standard, I have not conciously done anything to reach out to them whether professionally or in personal spheres. At the back of my mind, whether I admit it or not , they have been relegated to the blind spots of my heart and mind which will require way too much effort to reach. It takes deliberate effort to check out those blind spots to realize that they are there. I seek no balance in the partiality they face in society and do not push for fairness. Instead, I contribute to it because I believed the following fallacies:

1) We have nothing at all in common. No use hanging out.
2)There is no use training them. They are all the same.

As such, I do not count myself to have a single friend in my personal sphere (and some might say, even facebook) who isn't at least middle-class in Singapore. Although I proclaim to be championing the causes of underdogs in society, in reality, I am very much stuck in my own ivory tower aghast at the the thought of being associated with them. It is a hypocritical mindset that has been deposited and left untreated in my soul. Until now. I have never learnt to serve in the example of Jesus outside the church circuit because that was just ''beyond (and beneath) me''. I wasn't born in the top elite class but life has been kind to hand me a good deck of cards to start out with. In time, I started to mistake these tokens of grace to be an entitlement instead and forget that ceteris paribus, if other these superficial factors are removed, I can be just like them. Actually, what makes us so different from one another that I disparage diversity and seek homogeneity only?

I would have been content to them staying at the bottom rung and dismiss the disparities in social statuses as ''part of life'', something I am too weak to contend with. Unconsciously or otherwise, I would have contributed to them never rising against all that weighs them down to the bottom because I refused to train them at work or have been way too impatient and preferred to give my attention to a more 'promising' young trainee from a more polished pedigree.

This week, the thought that it could all happen the other way round confronted me. That I could be the one living from paycheck to paycheck, having a thousand mouths to feed, lowly educated and no promise of a better future because every 'tomorrow' brought its own uncertainties and life is harsh and unkind. That I was born with this deck of cards for a reason. To help, to share and not to hoard. That sharing doesn't mean a one-off donation or a fancy cheque but helping them rise above their limitations. As the old adage goes that it is better to help a man to fish than to give him a fish, why have I been so quick to dismiss and disregard and only choose ready-made instant pedigrees? The answer to that question unsettles me.

So I must put things right.