Saturday, August 25, 2012

awareness can sometimes be a double edged sword

while it's definitely good for more people (and here, it's a cue for the middle-class sheltered folks)
to "know the plight" of "those neighbourhood school kids from dysfunctional families" (so different from our mission school backgrounds)
what do we do with what we know?
it half-upsets me when we speak of them with such fatalistic & pitiful tones;
when we view them through our saviour-mentality lenses.
Most of the time all we think of is how to save them/change them/ whisk them away...
failing to appreciate them for who they are & where they come from (i.e their 'dysfunctional families')

call it positive re-framing, but i would want to believe that every family tries to maintain some degree of functionality.
different ways of coping, unconventional lifestyles, deviant behaviours, = cue divorce, abuse, runaways, homosexuals...
yes, not exactly pin-up families but who's to call them dysfunctional?
in some sense, every family also has its own 'dysfunctions'

so, i just wish that we could see these people = our fellow singaporeans, not as our objects of discovery, but really, just as people first.
people who have strengths, people with their very own weak moments...
and even for us as believers, to see them "just as how God sees them"


it may be just biased observations or over-sensitivity of a social work student,
but i for one as a fellow human, hope to never fall prey to this double-edged sword.