Something has been bothering me the past few days, and I can finally put my finger to it.

It's called... Consequence.

And I think it's a crucial life lesson we must learn. It's not that I'm deterministic or sadistic or ultra-conservative. It's just that there are many things that we don't see clearly. Read Lessig's "Free Culture", and he gave the example of DDT insecticide and how it became so popular when it was first invented. Everyone used it. Then they started realizing that it affected the environment: birds stopped reproducing, the ecosystem was being disrupted... There's just too many direct and indirect consequences that we can't keep track them all. Even if we do keep track of them, they are dynamic factors, not static and easy to predict. We can advocate for freedom to voice out our views, but sometimes we don't really consider the consequences that this freedom can result in. It may cause other problems that we cannot foresee.

What I'm trying to (ineloquently) say is that most things are like a double-edged sword. DDT is good and solves many problems of holey veggy, but it also brings about many problems in its wake. Sometimes, we wanna voice out our frustrations about a certain claim; e.g., we should encourage democratic free speech. But in advocating this, there are other consequences; e.g., rudeness, impoliteness, insults? Yeah, we assume that people are enlightened, and "should know better", but it doesn't alwiz happen that way does it? I've seen some decent and smart people that I totally lost respect for when they go too far in pushing their boundaries. I don't blame them however, coz I've done that myself too, on many occasions and learnt a bitter lesson... But I get very discouraged and disillusion. Oh well, *learning*. I'm the last person on earth who will be labbelled a saint, so who am I to judge? As the saying goes, let go and let God. Haha... Yes I'm an absolutely dependent creature. I'm a koala, I koala the eucalyptus everyday. What else can I say? That's me.

Well, as Principal Ong say (Yes, he has been 'upgraded', kee kee), you can't force anyone to do anything they don't wanna do. You can only explain to them how they can benefit from it. The rest is up to them. It's their choice, it's their life. My gosh... If I'm having so much problems with this, how am I gonna cope if I have a child??? Am I a control freak? *Panic* Sympathies for all the parents out there...