Note: National Day, Singapore in The irresistible urge to rant, riff and ramble

I’m going to open with the concept of love, because that’s what patriotism is– the love for one’s country.

Some people with nothing better to do will argue “no it’s not. There are so many forms of love”, but that’s rubbish. Humans have simple needs. That’s why we’re complicated.

And so the next step is “Why do we love?”

I get a lot of answers. Most of them are rubbish:

I love the chicken rice.
I love durians.

I love every shallow and simple manifestation of the country, but most likely the food, because our alphabeticised seven deadly sins start at gluttony and end at greed.

Or “I love the fact that I can go out at 2 am in the morning and I’ll be safer than anywhere else in the world”

“I love Singlish!”

And once I guess I figured those to be ridiculous and shallow reasons.

Actually, I still do.

Because, you see, any reason you can voice will never be the real reason; these reasons are only posthoc rationalisations sought out after you had already chosen to love, just as listening to anyone gush about their new partner will have to listen to a litany of all kinds of really, really weird stuff (wow, he makes sculptures out of his ear wax? That’s… nice.)

Maybe I could love because of what the country has done for me.

Well. I would if it had, in fact, done anything directly. Except that it didn’t do anything except exist, because, you see, I wasn’t here.

I left 25 years ago. I came back six years later to serve two and a half years of six and a half day weeks, two of which were hel because the the system did not sufficiently protect me from the problems that crop up in the army. I then spent another four years overseas at university because the Singapore education system did not have the capacity to offer me what I wanted and needed from life.

That doesn’t mean I don’t love it.

And you have to ask:

If you say you love something because of something it does for you, would you still love if that thing is gone?

Would you love Singapore if durians disappeared, or chicken rice, or if it were no longer safe to go out at 2 am?

I used to assume that people who said all those things would not; that I could take them at their word and surface and assume that these were the reasons.

But the truth is simpler and difficult to look at directly:

You do not need a reason to love.

You only need to make a choice to love.

And to love a country is to choose to give yourself back to something greater than yourself, that had something to do with your creation, and to hopefully find a place where you can give something back beyond yourself. And because it is a big thing, no reason will ever be enough.

Except perhaps one.

Why do I love Singapore?

Because if I don’t, and you don’t, who will?

Surely not Amos Yee.