2009 – The
global financial crisis War
Warning! This will be the strangest post I have ever contributed
here. If you do not like the meta physical, please stop now and
ignore this post. If you have no wish to be mentally ‘disturbed’,
please stop now and ignore this post. If you are already mentally
disturbed and unstable, please stop now and ignore this post.
But if you are mentally strong, I hope you will give me a
chance, read my presentation, and give some time to consider its
message.
This will be the year of war. In battles, one gets to see the
enemy, or use technology to detect the enemy, and then use various
ammunitions type to destroy the enemy. But in this war, you will
not get to see, hear, smell or use tech to detect the enemy.
It is the worse and most fearsome of all enemies mankind
can ever confront. The enemy is invisible and you can only feel it
but never know what the direction it attacks you. No one else can
help you fight it and only you alone can engage with it.
This enemy is called FEAR. And the battlefield
in your mind.
When you see the stock indexes fall, you feel
FEAR.
When you read about 650 people being retrenched, you feel
FEAR.
When you hear some people unable to gain employment for years, you
feel FEAR.
When you study, the image of unemployment looms in your mind, you
feel FEAR.
When the time to pay your bills comes, and you have little money,
you feel FEAR.
Fear crawls into the battlefield of your mind, and take swipes
at you. You try to avoid it, but it is always there in your mind.
You lock yourself into a video game, but it stares back at you
insolently.
You go into a cinema, to escape into another world for an hour
or two, but when your turn around and look, you can see it sitting
beside you. You drink to stupor, and enjoy a merciful sleep, but
when you awake, fear smiles triumphantly back at you.
You meet your acquaintances, and they too equally are in fear.
You are not alone. It is now a global phenomenon. As you talk and
discuss, fear looms bigger and bigger to dinosauric size, with hot
blazing eyes staring at you.
From its foul mouth, it shoots forth poisonous darts called
panic, worry and doubts. It will not kill you, at least not yet,
and will slowly chew away your brain fiber every moment of the day,
till it totally eats up your brain cells and makes you take that
leap of the ledge of a window on a high floor.
With its dirty razor sharp paws, it claws at you, leaving marks
known as anger, envy, intolerance and frustration in the corners of
your mind.
You try to run away and shut your mind, but those marks run deep
and painful. You attempt to ease that pain by lashing it out at
others, rightly or unjustly, mostly unjustly, to soften that pain
throbbing in your mind.
These are what Fear does to you. But you are not alone.
Mankind had faced fear since time began and had triumph before. The
weapons of successful conquest are knowledge, truth, patience and
resilience.
Even the bravest of men – the commandos, know fear. When they
jump out of an aircraft at 15,000 ft into thin air, they too feel
fear beside them prior to the jump. But they know that they had
prepared their parachutes and checked carefully, and know it will
open, as it had opened for others.
With such knowledge, they dispel fear and thrash it to oblivion,
and jump without fear.
Stock prices are volatile all the time, and do not reflect a
true gauge of a company’s health or performance. This is a truth and ammunition for
battle against Fear.
650 may be retrenched today. 6,000 may be retrenched tomorrow.
But can 1.9million people be retrenched? If you are one of the
retrenched, is there no job available in public sector?
Thousands of jobs are made available, and thousands more
possible, if one is not choosy. Such jobs may not be ideal, or pay
much, but one can survive on it for sure.
The crisis is only temporary. Earth’s fundamentals are still
strong and mankind still have basic needs to be met. This is a truth and ammunition for
battle against Fear.
Schooling is a means to gain knowledge. Crisis or no crisis, one
still needs to learn, in order to make a living. When the world is
stable, able minds would be required.
Thus knowledge is vital. The govt had stepped in to ensure
anyone who wants to learn will not be denied the opportunity to do
so, so that they do not need to worry, just focus 100% on learning
and getting skills. This
is a truth and ammunition for battle against Fear.
When you have no money to pay your bills, it would mean you had
over-extended the earning capacity of yourself. The only
solution is to make a correction.
Simplest action is to cut down consumption. Most extreme would
be to declare for bankruptcy and pay off your creditors through a
longer period.
There is nothing to be ashamed of. We are flawed human beings
and make mistakes. The only time we should be ashamed is when we
refuse to confront and correct our mistakes but to continue on
making worse out of it, driving ourselves deeper into the pit.
Your life is more precious than the credit card debt, car loan
debt, home loan debt and even gambling debts. A human life once
destroyed, is lost forever. You can never return.
As long as one still breathes, have hands and legs, debts
can always be repaid back thru honest work. This is a reality and ammunition for
battle against Fear.
Anger and frustration itself cannot kill one. The pain is real.
Energy develops from it. But instead of using such energy to vent
on others, it can be channeled to more productive use, such as
intensifying your labor output:
– from a student - studying harder for his test, road
sweeper – taking shorter breaks and sweep more streets, sales
engineer – work with a team to creatively seek solutions to close
cases, to the PM – cracking his whip on civil servant scholars to
seek out of the box solutions or look into dusty files called
proposals to find for solutions out of our crisis.
News reports, statistics, biased opinions and criticisms
may be adverse and disheartening daily, but Fear can be conquered.
It is a battle that only you and you alone can win, just like
anyone and everyone else in our world have to do now, for that
battle is in each and every individual’s own mind.
True friends, society and govt can only place ammunition at your
disposal. But the choice and willingness to accept ammo and
battle it out it is yours alone to make.
No one else can fight in out on your behalf within the deep
recesses of your mind. Unless you enjoy being enraptured and
conquered by fear, living a wasted life of unecessary misery,
bitterness and frustration in this crisis.
No one, absolutely no one, no matter who you are -
roadsweeper or PM, wants you to live in misery. You
are one of us, descendents of our forefathers whom give us our
today. May you make the right choice.Cheers!
