Bleeding-edge

Nades, I am glad you are back and I hope Terence is well too.

I was asked what trumps ‘life’. I said ‘goodness’. Say you witness a girl being violated and before you help her, an accomplice of the rapist warns you not to interfere or he will take your life. You tell the accomplice. ‘Take my life because I am going to help her’. Point is, threat to personal freedom presents itself every time you and Terence write and we do appreciate that at least for some journalists, values trump everything else, not to mention personal freedom.

I was also asked why I engage the New Straits Times when I pick up the The Sun free of charge. I said they compliment each other as long as you are able to discern and not totally embrace their opposing sentiments.

I said the latter (The Sun) is the technological equivalent of a hospital while the sentiment in the former (New Straits Times) is that you do not use the emergency ward to gauge the overall healthcare of the community but as a reminder of what could happen if traffic rules are disobeyed.

The latter is in a sense a very biased place where people vent issues, not sing hosannas. In essence, it reminds us that secularizing a traditional society is a bleeding-edge product and that research towards that end is on-going. It reminds us to keep things in perspective when every other news and sound bite is gloom and doom.

On the other hand, the former keeps telling us that if we held off buying a bleeding-edge product as the sole device to run our lives until all the kinks were ironed out, none of us would be giving any traction to the latter. So to survive, these strange bedfellows are destined to waltz.

A beer to you and Terence.