On the █, a fire broke out on the █ floor of a unit in our block. Ultimately, I don't think anyone was hurt, and it didn't seem a big deal in totality.
I just wanted to come here and piss and moan about how nonchalant and complacent we as a society seem to have become in the safety of Singapore. Admittedly, I might've not felt the same alarm I did had I not been holed up in my bedroom with the aircon on, and smelled obnoxiously thick smoke all of a sudden. I took a whiff at the air coming out of the air con, smelled that same smoke, and panicked like hell, thinking my compressor had caught fire or something. Bursting out my room door, I smelled that same smoke, albeit even much heavier, and I actually calmed down, thinking it was the haze that we've been warned was coming having came early. I suppose, to anyone not having been in an air con room, they'd have thought the same thing and dismissed it.
Although, with my outburst, my parents got more involved, which was when they noticed a lot of our neighbours from all floors on the walkways watching something. That's legitimately how we found out that there was a fire on our block. The neighbour directly adjacent to us didn't seem aware, so I rang their doorbell a few times and even shouted in. Eventually, the only person home, a teenage boy, answered, and that's when he got the news of a fire. Even then, everyone seemed more bemused by the fact that there was a fire moreso than panicked. I told my family to get their things ready in case we needed to get the hell out of dodge, and I wasn't taken very seriously.
The firefighters were called and the situation was contained quite quickly, although not before a lot of us were ordered to evacuate. In hindsight, I was praised by my sister for being the first to realise the situation was dire, and the only one who wanted to be ready for an evac. But it just makes me upset more than anything.
It's a sentiment I've harboured for more than a decade, born from the time I was doing security in slavery; for as invaluable as the relative safety of Singapore is, I despise how that safety conditions complacency in its citizens, to the point where very real threats become almost a bemusing joke to them. I kinda want to believe that humans have been hard wired through billions of years of evolution to react strongly to threats, and one of the most primitive threats would be a fucking fire. I don't know how, but it somehow seems that just a few decades in this plush environment has somehow overridden billions of years of conditioning. I hate how nonchalant everybody seemed about the fire, in the same way I despised everyone who scoffed and scorned at being inconvenienced by a security check. Look, I'm not doing this for fun; if you think you're better off without me, I can go home and sleep, and you can live with the knowledge of you being the one person in power having deemed my presence unnecessary if something does go wrong. Would it have been such a big deal to just grab your phone and MAYBE your wallet and getting out before being told to? I just don't get people. I really don't.
But perhaps more than that, I fucking despise how used to the smell of smoke we have become as a culture and society. I've heard more than a few people say that they didn't panic because they thought someone was burning offerings, which is a more than common practice here. That, and heavy haze is like a tri–annual event or something, and we just have to put up with it. I used to find it novel how Wally, a character in Pokémon RSE, had to move from a city to a quiet countryside with better air for his health, but now I find myself in his shoes. Granted, I know I'm being coddled hardcore as a Singaporean, and I know our air quality is much better than... other places where people conjugate, but sometimes it still feels to me like the air is vile and hostile, and I never feel near 100% because of it. And now that it's the "Seventh Month" of the Lunar Calendar, people are almost literally setting money on fire, including my own family, and it has just made breathing so much more painful and laborious than it needs to be.
Solutions? You must be a new reader; I've none. I'm just pissing and moaning.
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