Neil Humphreys: Don't be grumpy, make space for S'poreans to dance and play
The crises keep on coming. Iranians are protesting for their lives, Donald Trump is treating Greenland like a Miss America contestant, and Singaporeans are dancing near Bayfront MRT station.
There's anarchy on every corner.
While young Iranians throw stones on the streets of Tehran, young Singaporeans throw shapes on the underground linkway at Marina Bay Sands. It's out of control. They're popping and locking and doing all the other dance moves that I just looked up on Google.
Clearly, these dancers pose a threat to society, armed with bright white trainers and exposed belly buttons.
The great mirror crackdown
The authorities had no choice but to clip the wings of these dancing flocks.
According to reports, the full-length mirrors connecting Bayfront MRT station to Gardens by the Bay are now partially blocked with a white strip to deter dancers from doing their thing in front of their reflections.
That'll teach 'em.
Imagine being Singapore's representative at an international security briefing at the next Shangri-La Dialogue and saying: "For potential terror threats, we've got armed police at all major checkpoints. For potential dancing threats, we've got frosted mirrors."
Most governments employ intelligence experts to assess societal risks. In Singapore, we can just engage an interior designer to say: "I'm thinking white frosty lines, horizontal preferably, to make everyone look slimmer."
It feels extreme. If folks really wanted to deter teenagers from dancing in the MBS linkway, then surely playing Michael Bublé on a loop would've been easier.
Space: Singapore's rarest commodity
Unsurprisingly, young dancers took to social media to complain about the frosted mirrors, which now make it more difficult to practice.
(Of course, once these dancers reach 50, they'll wish they had frosted mirrors in their bathrooms. They might look at themselves and think "Broadway", but I look at myself and think "boiled chicken".)
But it's easy to empathise with their predicament.
Singapore has never found a space yet that it couldn't turn into a BTO, a shopping mall or a PRC family office.
Space is a premium in Singapore. It is something older generations recall with considerable fondness, like a first girlfriend or the Malaysia Cup.
Younger Singaporeans may feel they've got a better chance of visiting Space itself, rather than finding any down here.
And when they do carve out a few centimetres for themselves and improvise something creative, they are not applauded for their ingenuity. They are criticised.
Inevitably.
Because if Singapore ever made a local version of Snow White, it'd be called Liang Po Po and the Seven Grumpies.
'Facilitating seamless pedestrian flow'
Responding to Stomp's queries, an MBS spokesperson said the linkway mirrors were frosted to "facilitate seamless pedestrian flow", because spokespeople are duty-bound to sound like a foreign language student using a thesaurus for the first time.
The last time I needed to "facilitate seamless pedestrian flow", I visited a urologist. Funnily enough, he left me feeling a little frosty, too.
To reiterate the seriousness of the frosted mirrors, the spokesperson added that the linkway is a shared public space that had to remain "safe, accessible and free from obstructions", presumably confusing the area with an airport runway.
Still, it's comforting to know that families are safe from a couple of teenagers doing the two-step together.
No one wants a traumatised kid shouting: "Mummy, they just did the funky chicken in front of me, and now I don't want KFC anymore."
From dancing teens to jumping kids
In fact, no one wants a kid shouting anything in public.
In the same week, a viral video showed an elderly uncle berating a mother for her child's behaviour on an MRT train.
He accused the child of "jumping around" and the mother allegedly took exception to the criticism. (The kid should jump around at the Bayfront linkway. He's short enough to see beneath the frosted mirrors.)
The video doesn't show what the boy had supposedly done to earn the wrath of the gentleman, but based on his aggressive tone, the boy must have swept the uncle's leg like a young Jackie Chan while singing, "Everybody was kung fu fighting."
Otherwise, the outburst feels a little excessive, in both instances.
Let them dance. Let them play.
Can we not allow children and teenagers to express themselves occasionally?
Or must they "facilitate seamless pedestrian flow" in our utilitarian society, by shuffling silently from one tuition class to another?
They already have the twin existential threats of AI and climate change to deal with, along with ageing populations, declining birth rates, rising costs, and the very real possibility that Manchester United may never win a trophy again.
Surely, we can cut them a little slack in our shrinking public spaces.
They can dance and play and add splashes of colour to our Little Red Dot.
And we can put those frosted mirrors where they belong. In my bathroom.
Neil Humphreys is an award-winning writer and radio host, a successful author and a failed footballer.
