How close are we?

Hm.. I wonder if you guys feel it too. The anxiety. No it should be the increasing pitch of the anxiety in Singapore. I take public transport everyday (MRT) and the message reminding us to keep a look out for suspicious articles have increased in frquency and volume (literally, they got louder). It is there the anxiety, the worry, but the government does a pretty good job of keeping us calm, and perhaps in the dark about how safe we are. (or rather how unsafe we are). It is easier if we choose not to think about where we are. We are perhaps standing right on the yellow line. Our geographic location, where we stand regarding the issue of the Iraq war, our population profile. Everything, we assume to be something stable and safe, are really pretty fragile. Yet, we are still capable of our present complacency. The continous replay of that message in the MRT stations have long been accepted as another stupid piece of warning, We have now conditioned ouselves to ignore it. Along with the ones about 'no food and drinks' and 'stand behind the yellow line'. We would much rather concern ourselves about the lack of dustbins in the stations and how much inconvinience it has caused.

How long has it been since the dustbins have all been removed? Slowly we get use to it, we see nothing strange. We forget to keep ourselves on our toes. We worry more over our grades than our national security. We get bored with the long display of our military prowess in the NDP, we much prefer watching fire works. We put absolute trust that the system we've built will support us. We know we will never suffer natural disasters like the one in New Orleans right now, or the Tsunami in Indonesia last year. But does that make us safe? How blind can we make ourselves to possible dangers? I would much rather be ignorant and happy any day over knowing and worrying. But I think sometimes, we need to ask ourselves how close are we to threats hovering just above our horizon. How close are we?