I wonder if all this talk about citizenship is getting a little out of hand. And ugly.

Just a couple of hours ago, there was a Straits Times tweet that popped up; some reader had apparently written in to ask that PRs be allowed a vote in lift upgrading for their blocks.

His letter was well-worded, simple and to-the-point; he just wanted to be able to add in his voice if it ever came about that they were asked to vote if the people in his block wanted to improve their living conditions.

Here's what I don't understand. It's lift UPgrading. So it shouldn't be a bad thing, right? I don't know, but would anyone vote *against* lift UPgrading? Would anyone vote *against* having the lift stop at every floor instead of every five floors or every other floor?

But from there, the comments on the forum for that letter were just uncalled for. The guy was just asking to be allowed to vote to upgrade the lifts in his block.

So where do people get off with comments like:
"You want to vote for our government next, IS IT??"
"You come here and steal our jobs, our houses, and enjoy free protection from our sons and now you want to vote?"
"We don't want you here anyway! You want to complain so much, then go back to wherever you came from!"

Like I said, the guy wasn't *complaining*. And I don't see why anyone would vote *against* lift upgrading; if anything, he'd probably be contributing to a larger "yes" vote. And "free protection"? How does that figure? I have friends who are PRs who did NS. From what I understand, second-generation PRs serve the same kind of National Service as citizens, and one of these guys I'm talking about was a hell of a lot more fired up about his National Service than most male citizens I know. He's proudly Singaporean by now, and he still complains about NS guys (whom I presume are mostly born citizens) disgracing the uniform by not wearing it properly. So where the hell do you get off talking about "free protection"?

I don't think everyone whom you know is a citizen. There's a high chance that among the folks that these people call "friends", there are foreigners and there are PRs. You might not even know that some of them aren't citizens. I wonder if they would make all these same xenophobic remarks to their faces instead of letting all that hatred fly freely from behind a username and a keyboard. And I feel for this poor guy who just decided to ask about lift upgrading, and got bucketfuls of hate and vulgarities in reply. If I were him and saw all those comments, I'd be a lot more wary of my neighbours the next time I stepped out of the door of my flat.

But maybe that's what these people were aiming for; to make him feel as unwelcome as possible so that he'd "go back to his own country".

In the wake of all the violence in Norway and London, has anyone thought that maybe all that talk of peace and harmony isn't just about harmony among citizens? I can't speak for everyone, but sure, I would think that PRs know that we don't have the same rights as citizens; there has to be some difference, after all. If we're all going to live together, there's a lot that newcomers have to learn, and there's a lot that others have to accept and tolerate. What the world needs now probably isn't love, but a huge heaping helping of tolerance.

And in the most recent elections, with all the outpouring of anti-foreigner sentiment, I was honestly quite afraid for a while. Until then, I didn't know that I was living in a society that had so much hate in it.

I've lived here all my life, I was born here, but by virtue of the fact that my parents aren't citizens, but PRs, I was born a PR. All my life, I've been grateful that I grew up here instead of where my parents came from; I'm grateful that it has a system of governance that despite its pitfalls (because what system has none?), generally works. I've always been grateful that this is a safe place, but recently, it feels a lot less so.