I’m sorry we are a rude country. Please forgive us. It isn’t our fault.

After more than a quarter century of courtesy campaigns, Singapore is still ranked at the bottom five of the Reader’s Digest courtesy survey. So we have campaigns to train us how to smile more so we can beam at our new IR visitors (Four Million Smiles Campaign), we have service staff incentive programs to teach us how to say please and thank you, and now the head of the Singapore Kindness Movement (what an awesome job he has) said that Singaporeans need to be reminded to be more courteous and that the courtesy message has to be reinforced to take root. So what excuses were given this time? One of them was “Hong Kong took years and years to get where they are today. It is possible for Singapore, we have shown ourselves to be a nation that succeeds if we put our mind to it.” Really? You know what Singapore is good for, giving ourselves excuses. We are unique case. We are so small. We don’t have a homogeneous population. We are still so young. We are a developing country. We have no resources. Our human resources and political stability are the most important. So because of all these factors that set us SO apart from other countries, its not our fault we have a one-party system, opposition wards should be down on the list for lift upgrading, freedom of speech is not allowed and oh, its also not our fault that we are rude. When ever there are business opportunities, suddenly we are a first class country, a world class nation, the oasis of a developed nation in the midst of south east asia. And then when faced with challenges and when failures are pointed in our faces, suddenly we are just a developing country and too young to be facing the competition. And the worst part is, we Singaporeans buy into all that crap. We are not a developing country anymore. We just use that as a security blanket to make up for how socially inapt we are. How different are we from Hong Kong? In what way have HK been given more years to be more polite then us? There are only two things we can do about it. Accept the fact that we are not the most polite society in the world and bloody move on with it! Do the French care that they are rude? No! Or we can accept that there is a deeper issue in society and through subtle education changes, inculcate the values of politeness to our children, and the results will be shown about 4 generations from now. Setting up courtesy campaigns, asking people to smile in front of a camera, banning chewing gum because people can’t dispose it properly and drawing little yellow boxes in front of MRT trains and reminding people in four languages to queue up behind the yellow line is seriously no different from training a bunch of monkeys to eat the yellow banana. Why don’t they fine us for not saying please and thank you too? No amount of foreign investment, integrated resorts and MICE tourist can make Singapore a better place if it doesn’t come from within. Smiling at a tourist, or waving at your boss or saying please to a customer is not courtesy. True courtesy is saying thank you to the hawker uncle, the cleaner, the rubbish collector and the sales girl. It’s holding the door for everyone and slowing down a bit to let people pass through first. Courtesy is not for improving the economy and attracting more visitors to Singapore so our GDP will increase. It is just to make someone else happy. And I think because Singapore forgot about the human equation in courtesy, it has completely missed the point.