Responding to your hate mail about the Hengs - News Today in World

Responding to your hate mail about the Hengs

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Title : Responding to your hate mail about the Hengs
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news-today.world | Hello again. I have received some hate mail further to my last article, basically challenging me to sponsor the education of the two oldest children of the Heng family (Samantha and Rachael) because I am a multi-millionaire working in finance with no kids of my own, the amount it would take for me to pay for their education would be a drop in the ocean for someone like me who earns a few millions a year. There are a few good reasons why I wouldn't want to do something like that despite the fact that I did come from a poor family in Ang Mo Kio myself and I too had a very tough childhood.

1. I am already helping the poor in the UK and abroad. 

We pay a lot more income tax in the UK, so rich folks like me are already directly subsidizing the poor through the tax system. Yes London is a great place to make money if you're in the financial services sector, but part of the deal means that you have to subsidize the poor people through the taxation system which is fair enough, that's how governments around the world are funded. In fact, if you are a working adult who pays taxes than you are already helping the poor in your country through the income tax system, but of course, income tax rates vary from country to country. I may be channeling my earnings offshore at some stage if I earn even more, but for now, I'm happily paying my taxes and helping the poor already in the UK through our generous welfare state. So poor families in the UK who have a lot of kids do get help from the government and those handouts do come directly from the tax money paid by rich folks like me. And furthermore, whilst I don't brag about this publicly but for the record, I do donate plenty of my wealth to charities of my choice and support the causes that I do believe in - I do support some great charities doing vital work around the world.
2. The Hengs didn't ask for help. 

I believe in the principle of, "you can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink". The Hengs didn't ask for help and even though they probably could do with some help, there is no point in trying to help someone who doesn't want help. I always go back to the story of my cousin - look, I was poor when I was a kid and so were my cousins. Her teacher was kind and understood her difficult family circumstances, so the teacher gave her a form to fill up which would allow her to get some help from the government to help her with school expenses. What did my cousin do? She was so ashamed of being poor, her primary fear was being mocked by her classmates if they found out about this - so she took the form and hid it till the deadline was over. When we learnt about it, we were puzzled to say the least (her family members were angry she refused the free money), who would say no to free money that came with no strings? Why was she that worried about what people would think or say if she was indeed entitled to that money? But the bottom line is, even when she was offered help, she flatly refused to take it. Now in that video, the Hengs made no such appeal for any kind of help, so as in the case of my cousin, it is pointless even if you show up at their front door with a wad of cash.

3. Even if you did give them a wad of cash...

Here's the problem with individual acts of charity, there's no way you can monitor what happens to your donation. What if you gave them a donation with the intention that the money is to be spent on the children's education, how are you going to ensure that they do spend the money wisely and not waste it on something like alcohol and cigarettes? OK that's a worst case scenario but this is often cited in the UK when families like the Hengs are given child benefit payments - the money is simply handed to the parent(s) and there is no mechanism to monitor if the money is actually spent on the children. Even if you say, okay, it's a voucher for school fees or uniforms so we know the money is definitely spent on school related stuff, then that solves the problem? Actually no, that simply means that the parents will realize that all the money they had set aside for school fees and uniforms can now be spent on things like alcohol and cigarettes. Even if the parents do have the best intention to help their children, the Hengs have had a terrible track record of making very bad decisions which have landed them in this situation - their financial situation is nothing short of a catastrophe, they don't need cash per se, they need a social worker to tell them how to sort their lives out and stop making these awful mistakes which plunge them deeper and deeper into poverty. Oh the irony that Mr Heng is actually a social worker himself. Well this does beg the question then, how's he going to help anyone as a social worker if he needs help himself.
4. I don't want to encourage others like the Hengs

Sorry if this makes me sound like a bastard, but parents need to take responsibility for their own children. They can't just have loads of kids and then expect some kind guardian angel to hear about their poverty over social media and fix their dire financial situation. I don't want others like them to think, oh this guy is a guardian angel, he will solve all our financial problems if I just write in to him so I can afford to be totally reckless and do irresponsible shit - someone will come and help me out. Let's get real here, you need to solve your own problems rather than pray for a guardian angel to come your way! Highlighting the plight of their children is a very good warning to other parents to exercise birth control and not have more children than they can afford - the only sad part is that the kids who are carrying this vital warning have done absolutely nothing wrong, but unless we make their suffering public and shame their parents for making them suffer like that, how are we going to stop other stupid, irresponsible parents from having too many children? Don't get me wrong, I came from a poor family myself, I genuinely feel sorry for the children in the Heng family, especially the two oldest daughters - but poor people cannot expect guardian angels to magically swoop in and solve their financial problems.

5. Mr Heng is completely unrepentant.

In the CNA Insider video, he is still extremely smug, claiming that children are a blessing from god and other bullshit like that. He doesn't show any remorse about the suffering that he has put his wife and children through. He's a terrible father and husband as far as I'm concerned and I would hate to 'reward' someone as awful has him with money. Yes, we are going back to the Victorian concept of the deserving poor: I would much rather be generous with a family who have become poor through no fault of their own: take for example my friend Douglas. His father was the sole breadwinner of his family as his mother was too ill to work, but one day, his father had a terrible car accident when the vehicle he was in collided with a bus (the accident was NOT his fault as the bus ran a red light and he was a passenger in the car). So suddenly, Douglas' family was plunged into poverty as their sole breadwinner was in hospital, badly injured and the bills were stacking up as they ran out of savings. Contrast that to the Hengs who went from an ordinary family to a poverty stricken one through their decision to have more kids than they can afford to support. When one's resources are limited, you have to prioritize whom you have to help first and I'd much rather help Douglas' family. It seems harsh to punish the entire Heng family for the mistakes of the father, but there you go. I'd never help him as long as he is so unrepentant.
6. I don't trust them as they are awful parents who don't know how to raise their kids. 

Oh let's go back to the issue of 'spoilt brats' which has been a hot topic on my blog. It seems like an issue that many of you Singaporeans are obsessed with. You'd think that being so poor, the kids in that family won't be spoilt, right? Wrong. Being spoilt has nothing to do with being rich - it is about using tantrums and emotional blackmail to get what you want. In the CNA Insider video, we saw the children fighting over their toys and the young son Raphael threw a tantrum and cried when he didn't get his way. Oh and that young girl Arielle threw a massive, epic tantrum for the camera when she knew that she was being filmed. Good grief. What a disgraceful display of horrifically bad behaviour. If I were Mr & Mrs Heng, I would have reviewed the footage and have never agreed for that to be shown to the public as it puts not just them but their kids in a very bad light. Here you have one of the poorest families in Singapore, yet the kids are still resorting to crying and throwing tantrums publicly to try to get what they want? If anything, this video demonstrates that there is really no correlation between giving your kids expensive toys and turning them into spoilt brats - it is all about how you teach them how to negotiate reasonably when they want something rather than throwing tantrums. But with so many children, is it any wonder that Mr & Mrs Heng don't even have enough time to teach their kids basic things like that?

7. It's not the end of the world for Samantha and Rachael. 

Look, many people come from poor families and succeed against the odds. I am one such kid from a poor family and sure, it really sucks to see the more privileged kids have a much easier time than myself, but I managed to make it nonetheless by making some very intelligent choices and adopting the right attitude. What these two girls need are really good mentors who can give them career advice when it comes to their further education and career choices because let's face it, they're not going to get any help at all from their parents, are they? Likewise for myself, money per se couldn't solve the biggest challenges that I had - gosh, my biggest problem was coming from an environment where ambition was sneered upon and considered toxic. It's the maximizer vs settler conundrum again: do you raise your kids to be ambitious and aim high, or do you encourage them to settle for a quiet life in order to avoid disappointment when you fail to get what you want? I am astounded, I am amazed that I had any ambition at all left in me given the way my parents were extreme settlers: for example, they hated the idea of me taking part in any kind of competition, because they wanted to spare me to disappointment of losing. But if I never took part, how was I ever going to win? You can see how hard it was to try to drag myself out of the gutter when I was brought up by parents like that, who had that kind of mentality so deeply engrained in their culture. Samantha and Rachael need good mentors and I hope they will find them.
8. There are families far worse off than the Hengs Singapore. 

Why would you deem the Hengs more deserving of any kind of direct intervention, just because they agreed to be a part of this CNA investigative report? Indeed, there are far more desperate cases in Singapore, the kind involving a parent who is terminally ill with something like cancer and people like that tend to prefer to want to keep a low profile, they don't want to public to see them suffer like that. At least the Hengs are all in good health. Surely when it comes to charity, we should be helping the families who are most in need, who are most desperate, rather than the ones who are most shamelessly begging for help openly on social media? This is why we should donate to charities who have had years of experience in reaching out to those who are most needy, rather than have this kind of knee-jerk reaction to anything we happen to stumble across on social media. Likewise, am I the only rich person who has seen that Youtube video? Why put the onus on me to help them? I have been nothing but extremely critical of them - why don't you approach all these people who were saying all these positive things about the Hengs and ask them to each donate say $10, that would be more than enough to raise a tidy sum for that family. Let the people who are so supportive of them on social media back their words up with some real money. After all, talk is cheap - you really wanna support them? Give them your cash.

9. That's what charities are for! 

Look, trying to help an individual or a family like that is really a full time job - you can't just hand them a wad of cash, you need to help them get out of their desperate situation in the first place by rectifying the underlying problems. So in the case of the Hengs, the sensible solution would be to give them some kind of free childcare which would free Mrs Heng up to return to teaching; Mr Heng should really also be given the kind of help he needs to retrain in order to gain access to more well paid employment. Regardless of how you feel about social workers, you simply cannot attempt to bring up a big family on that little money in a place like Singapore so the most obvious and sensible thing for him to do is to get a much better job. Then the children also need help to ensure that they get the kind of help they need with their school work, so they are not massively disadvantaged compared to their peers. I can see a range of different charities, with different kinds of expertise getting involved to help a family like that. An individual donor wouldn't have the time, expertise or experience to know how to deliver the right results, that's why if you want to help people like the Hengs, then make a donation to a charity instead. Giving people like that a wad of cash will only make them think that they can beg for money, thus creating the mindset of dependency - that's so wrong as it can hurt the people you want to help.
Allow me to give you a case study to demonstrate why individual acts of kindness can lead to chaos - I'm sure some of you will remember the horrific Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 which killed 72 people in London. The shocking images of the entire tower block engulfed in flames stunned the city into a huge outpouring of grief and this resulted in spontaneous acts of charity with people turning up donating food and clothes for the victims. However, as it was completely spontaneous and not organized, nobody had a clue what the victims needed or even where to bring the donations. Many people turned up at Grenfell Tower itself which was of course not accessible given the building had become unsafe after the huge fire and they didn't even know where to find the victims who needed help since they weren't just sitting around on the pavement outside the burnt out buildings - they had already been given shelter and dispersed away from the immediate vicinity. Several local groups tried to organize some kind of order amongst the chaos, but they weren't speak to each other and there was often a duplication of efforts - so for example, they desperately needed nappies for the babies but the donors had no idea and brought things like bottled water instead. Was there goodwill in these individual acts of spontaneous charity? Of course, a lot of it. Did it do any good? No, it didn't because it was all terribly disorganized and you have to ask yourself, what is the point of making a donation if it doesn't benefit the people you're trying to help? It is important to identify one central charity who will organize all the efforts and they should only accept money (and not random items of donation), so they can spend the money on exactly what the victims need. Likewise for the Hengs, they don't need random acts of spontaneous charity: they need a case worker to get them organized, to sort their mess out.

10. Let's put things in perspective, allow me to quote some lyrics from Evita. 

"But first tell me who'd be delighted
If I said I'd take on the world's greatest problems
From war to pollution, no hope of solution
Even if I lived for one hundred years

So go if you're able to somewhere unstable
And stay there!
Whip up your hate in some tottering state
But not here dear
Is that clear dear?"
Basically, this was Evita's song that told her critics to go fuck themselves, because they were criticizing her for not having achieved all the things she had set up to do. I am a blogger, one who happens to be quite rich, but did I ever say I was going to be some kind of superman or guardian angel character who was going to solve every problem I came across? Hell no, I am just a blogger, who do you think I am? I wrote that piece about the Grenfell Tower fire because I thought it would be the kind of topic I could help my readers understand and that it made for interesting discussion - did I claim for a second that I was going to personally solve the UK public housing crisis? Nope, I didn't. All I wanted to do was to discuss the issue, not solve it. It's not my responsibility to solve that problem, no that is something for the British government to have to take care of. Likewise, in the case of the Heng family, well firstly it should be the parents who take responsibility for their own family and then if the welfare of the children are seriously compromised, then it would be the responsibility of the Child Protective Services Department (part of the Ministry of Social & Family Development in Singapore), along with any other local charity whom the Hengs may approach for help. Bloggers are free to talk about anything they want to, simply starting a conversation on a topic doesn't make us obliged to provide all the solutions for the problematic solutions we may discuss. So even if I do talk about the Heng family, that is not my problem to solve. 

So there you go, I'm sorry if that makes me sound like a complete bastard but those are the reasons I'm not going to hand over a donation to the Hengs when I am in Singapore this week. You can bitch all you want about me being selfish and judging them but I remind you that Mr Heng put his family in this position in the first place and he should at least show some remorse and beg his wife and children for forgiveness before he can expect any help. But of course, being Chinese, he'll never do that - there are so many bad Chinese parents out there but they never get judged by the public for his awful mistakes which cause their family so much suffering because children are just somehow meant to put up with the mistakes of their parents? I wonder how the children feel about being in the media spotlight like that. Well I don't buy that. Over to you, feel free to leave a comment below and let's keep this discussion going. Many thanks for reading.



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