NDR2014: Making this Singapore a home for all ages

During the National Day Rally in 2014, PM Lee said that, ” We want Singapore to be the best place to live, work and play. We want this to be an outstanding city, well-planned, well-run, offering a high quality of life, full of buzz and vibrancy. We want this to be our cherished home where we grow our roots, build emotional bonds and form new fond memories. We want this to be a special red dot for all Singaporeans.”

I believe that every Singaporean is thankful for the effort that our government have been putting in a tremendous amount of effort to ensure that all citizens are able to live comfortably here. This is especially true since Singapore is a multi-racial society and it takes time and effort to recognize the needs of different race and religion. All young and old are able to live peacefully with people of different race and religion.

At the present moment, cost of living is still affordable for most of the citizens and people are able to meet their daily necessity. There are still coffee shops that sell cheap and nice food, expensive and exquisite restaurants that cater to the needs of different people. This ensures that choices are available to people of different income groups.

However, i am worried about the “housing rules” in Singapore. Though the government have implemented measures that ensures there is housing for all, single parent are not able to get a house even if they are able to afford it, instead, the government give priority to married couples when they want to purchase their own house. Hence, i find the government a little bias in some ways.

There are also charitable and religious groups that make trips to elderly leaving alone, providing them with food and even cleaning up their houses. 

 

ALS ice bucket challenge

ALS is known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). It is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that largely affects the nerves. The patient will eventually die as the disease will eventually prevent the brain from commencing any actions and that the person will lose the ability to move such that they are completely paralysed. Furthermore, only 10% of ALS sufferers live longer than 10 years upon diagnosis.

The ALS ice bucket challenge involves people dumping a pail of ice water on themselves while being filmed. The person will then nominate others to do the same. Nominated people will have 24 hours to do the same. The purpose of this challenge is to raise awareness for ALS. A variation of the challenge would be that the nomiated people either do the challenge or donate to the charity while another variation is that the person doing the challenge donates to the charity after completing the challenge. To date, the charity has received more than US$100 million in donations from more than 3 million donors.This is an amazing feat especially when this challenge was only popularised since July. Notable people who have taken part in this challenge includes former US president George Bush and basketballer LeBron James.

I feel that this challenge has really helped raise awareness especially when majority of us have not even heard of such a disease. This movement has also been so successful as the media has allowed for the dissemination of information such that most people around the world have heard of it.

However,there are also criticisms of this challenge such that many have stated that it is a waste of water. Actor Matt Damon stated that up to 800 million people in the world do not have clean water to drink and that 2.4 billion people lack access to adequate water sanitation.