You Swallow It Whole

Three
            We Care
                      For The Earth
            We Are Green
                          & Gracious
banners on the condo site corner Lavender and Jalan Besar for the passing traffic. 
            Miscellaneous others—Falling Objects Can be Fatal; Hook On Life Line; Crane Lifting Safety, Keep Your Safety; Working Together Gets the Job Done Safely; Protect Your Hands, Don’t Lose Your Touch; Say No To Falling Objects.
            Not exactly Orchard Road copywriting.
            Elsewhere on other sites tables of zero man-hours lost to injury or death in twenty metre canvas stretches likewise turned out to the street for passersby.
            Meanwhile contractors and corporations getting away with blue murder. 
            As of Thursday last week thirty-three workplace deaths this year in Singapore. (At the end of May sixty-three in Australia, where the population is five times the size. Malaysia in 2014 nine hundred and thirty-three were recorded.)
            In today’s paper report on a case of a heatstroke death last December for a Hebei chap who missed out on the mandatory fourteen day weather acclimatization program. From minus 7 - 3 degree average temperature back home into this hot-house hell laboring on the conds. 
            But he came willingly, locals will respond. Indeed there are long queues waiting.
            The harried maid who is routinely beaten, starved and working from morning to late night, the gardening and garbage details, street-sweeps, cleaners, foreign labourers and others driven like slaves by the heirs of former coolies fed opium by the colonial masters who are aped by the upper tier all too much to stomach some days. Particularly with the pretense, artful manipulation and arrogance and self-serving justifications added. 
            The old story the world over of course: the poor suffering other bombed in their unfortunate cities and deserts, drowning in the seas, herded in the camps not especially difficult for those on the other side to abide.
            A friend recently sent a Youtube attachment of a gabfest featuring the endearing Slovene Slavoj and the Greek former Finance Minister Varoufakis at a Southbank, London public forum shortly after the Paris attacks. Brought reminders of the polished showman Obama gently roasting the media and cracking nicely timed jokes—fine man and all that—while the drone attacks continued. Another French sponsored Israeli-Palestinian conference; humanitarian agencies counting bodies and making press releases in the Mediterranean. Here recently an air show featuring the latest fighter jets entertaining crowds.
                                                                                                                                                                                                              Straits Times, Tue 7 June 2016