reminding myself of the core of my being

I am learning again who I really am. I have sort of decided that I wasn't the social-activist sort, not the kind who will go for campaigns or demonstrations, nor am I the kind who will attend conferences and schmooze around with other like-minded people. I admire their dedication and wish that I had that kind of *spirit* to go for what they believe in. I guess for me its going to be about a different kind of path, and I really don't know where writing or thinking about science will take me. 

So who am I then? More like a original thinker who looks at ideas and the interface between different ideas and with reality. I think about ways of thinking, and about economy, education and the environment, mainly. I think about the material basis of our everyday lives, which in itself, is an intersection of the environment and economy, and I think about the way ideas *flow* in our lives, how we interpret, how we derive meaning from the things we know, and how to encourage a kind of thinking that opens minds instead of enclosing them, as how our education systems have tended to be. I think about the impacts of society, how technology changes the way we think, and the way we do things, social organisation being one of them. 

I see now that Singapore actually has a very diverse activist ecology, with many different people and different groups all in their niches. But there's a lot of coexistence, not mutualism, and I think this one of the reasons why Bernise set up SYINC... But to me, it seems that many of these NGOs, are like the politics of today, still stuck in the previous generation's way of doing things. Yeah sure, they are using Facebook more, but essentially, their mode of thinking has remained unchanged. yeah. Perhaps human rights is still human rights is still human rights. And the really sad thing is the state of things in Singapore's civil society, that it still largely a fringe movement. I know that some groups have had some success, but civil society is still as yet, not yet mainstream. How to shtick human rights ideas into ordinary Singaporeans who don't think through things, or don't express these thoughts? 

I know this is improbable, but is the civil society sorta anti-religions? Hmm.. There are a lot of things going on that I don't fully understand, I admit, but... the case of Singapore is a unique case where there is a dominant entity that wields almost all the political power, and there are a pluralism of institutions with different kinds of social influence... 

I think civil society might need to stronger connections between other social groups in order to really permeate into mainstream society... But all of these are already slowly happening anyway. 

so where do I enter into these tangled conversations about rights and dignity? Honestly, I don't have a clue...