He Is My Heart.

( The two darling eggs in the nest behind our heating unit. We had to shoo Momma pigeon away by wielding a toilet brush and growled menacingly at it before any pic could be taken,coz she is one feisty momma!)

These days one guy has been occupying my mind alot. Other than darl. He is Nguyen Thuong Van, a 25 year-old Melbourne man of Vietnamese origin whose hope to repeal his death sentence in Singapore is fading in face of a tough anti-drug stance taken by Singapore government. He was caught possessing 396grams of heroin in 2002 at Changi Airport, in the motive said to be to repay debts incurred by his twin-brother, and is expected to be hung as soon as this friday.

Yes, he is a criminal. Unforgivable in the eyes of justice by singapore law. He first came to my attention when TV news started to broadcast trail of updates on his case. And the context, being Singapore, intensified my interest. First i dismissed the whole publicity as just a political stunt, as Australian government was criticised for taking special interest in Corby, an Australian girl being trialed in Bali for drug possesion simply because she is a white, while other non-white Australians being trialed overseas did not see the government lifting one finger. So i was like, yeah right, to me Nguyen is just political puppet to prove that Australians in general aren't ethnic-egoists.

But i gradually as details about him unraveled, and his teary mom pleaded repeatedly in public to ask for help to save his son, i find myself more n more emotionally drawn to this doomed man. He has such a loving mother who believed the goodness in him, who even wrote a letter in Vietnamese addressing to Queen Elizabeth to save his son's life. In this video, his mom said: " He is my heart. If anything happens to him, my heart will stop." I was particularly stirred by an excerpt of today's article on Nguyen:'In the days leading up to his hanging, authorities are expected to give Mrs Nguyen a daily 30-minute visit, instead of the regular allowance of one 30-minute visit a week, because Nguyen has been "banking" his visiting time.
But she will not be able to touch the son she gave birth to in a refugee camp and brought to Australia on a boat.
Nguyen will have to sit behind a thick glass pane.'

It is true that all mothers love their children even if they are satans, but she convinced me that Nguyen is just a man who has commited a mistake in a rush of foolishness or desperateness, the mistake that now will cost his life. He is so young,only a year older than me, and has to prepare to die.

I m outraged, by the paradoxical concept of death penalty. I knew that it exists in Malaysia, Singapore and even the US but it never cut so close to my skin before. During JC , one of the GP discussion topic was Capital Punishment, and one point of debate is :does the government has the right to take someone's life away, just because he murdered someone , or in this case, carried out a severe offence. Does two wrongs make one right? My stance has always and will always be a resounding NO! No no no. The sanctity of life. Singapore and Malaysia are dear to me in alot of sense, but it just dawned on me how ironically cold and faceless can justice be. How governments can maintain a stoic stance on their political agenda at all costs. Once the iron fist is clenched, other things are secondary and lives are just snubbed in that clenched fist. A man known as David W wrote in his journal when he was about to be hung:
"They weighed me today, not because they are worried about me putting on weight, no, not for that," the heroin trafficker writes in his journal.
"They need to know how heavy I am to calculate the length of the rope.
"It's very scientific. The men in the lab coats write books on how to do it right."

I was so disturbed by the idea that since 1991, Singapore has hung over 400 people. And over 70 percent of interviewed Singaporeans support the death penalty. I am angry at these people, I am angry at how governments have to maintain their credibility through consistent actions of which certain people are just political sacrifice. Civilians and troops who died in iraq, people on death row. All these deaths are simply 'necessary' . I am so angry that i refuse to think objectively even though that i know that i shouldn't let my emotions run over me. But it is a life we are talking about. A simple cost-benefit analysis would suggest that death penalty is more cost-efficient than long-term imprisonment. A cost-benefit analysis will also suggest that government cannot risk their credibility by sparing Nguyen's life. After doing Econs for 4 years if i can't figure that out i might as well ram myself against the wall like that dumb fly. But Econs never taught me how to measure the value of life. Simply because it is insurmountable. Sometimes i wish i can jerk some singaporeans/malaysian on their shoulders, and beg them to think less objectively. Please let things cut closer, even they could hurt. Please question, please yell, please pierce through that cellophane that separates our country's air from the rest of the world's. And most importantly, please feel for others. We are simply so unaware,happily planting flowers on the fertile soil where skulls are buried,to a point that unawareness becomes complete desensitisation and let it be disguised under the name of 'objectivity'.

Many people rally for Nguyen here, by signing petitions and even held a Catholic prayer session for him. They see him as a life, not just as an offender. All humans deserve that recognition.