Let’s start planning now. Because if 11½ months from now we have to slog through another season of tedious, tepid, yawn-inducing “What a year it was!” roundups, we swear we’re going to find a cave somewhere in MacRitchie Reservoir, crawl in, and never come back out.What we’re lobbying for is a little excitement, a little conflict, a little intrigue. Something that’s actually worth talking about, as opposed to the usual bitching about the queues in front of nightclubs or taxi drivers not being able to make change for a fifty.Take dying. We suck at it. Steve Jobs, Osama bin Laden, Christopher Hitchens, Muammar Gaddafi, Amy Winehouse, Kim Jong Il—most countries have put in serious effort on the celebrity deaths front. Here, we just find rotting corpses in water tanks. Is one celebrity death too much to ask for?Then there are disasters, natural and otherwise. Japan had its earthquake-slash-tsunami, while Brazil and half of Asia was paddling to work. We have the technology to control our own weather, surely. If we want to paddle, too (it looks like fun!), we’ll need to do better than ponding. We deserve better. As for that little hiccup with the trains, that was nothing. If we want our transportation nightmares to be world-class we need aggro commuters.Next, politics: no coups, no riots, no revolutions. No fun. Just calm and orderly democracy. Not that we want to be like Greece, where protestors kicked the shit out of other protestors, leaving cops protesting that protestors were stealing their jobs. But at least the kind of uncivilized discourse that is the staple of American politics, digging up dirt on your opponents and all that. The one bright spot was that dim MP and his foot-in-mouth assessment of the SMRT debacle. More of this, please, in 2012.Happy New Year!
