Just when I thought I'd seen it all, I was pointed to: Swearing is too risky for S'poreans

Still, I think this isn't as bad as the one on skydiving.

Speaking of which, one of the many, many comments (many from the same IP address) left by the Red Guards on that post reads that "it was NOT INTENDED to be a serious forum letter, just a bloody ASSIGNMENT, dont u people get it." Which brings us to the questions of:

- Why it was sent in if it was not a serious letter (Why are school teachers flooding the ST forum with this sort of rubbish? Why not return to the days when students wrote mock letters instead of actually sending them in for publication and only good ones were sent in? If it's an assignment, I hope it's marked for content as well as for language.)
- Why he didn't just write a letter thanking a taxi driver (Maybe it was in the assignment guidelines.)
- Why the letter was approved in the first place (Are the rejected letters even worse than this?!)
- What the raison d'etre of the Staits Times Forum is (To show that "Singapore people are intelligent and mature. And I think they can make their own judgement... But there may some who are not sufficiently discerning and if one day something goes wrong, then we will have to repair the damage."?)
- Whether the letter was a post-modernistic satire/tribute to the inanity/deplorability of the bulk of published submissions (I doubt it, given the grafiti left by the Red Guards)
- Why I got hit by the aforementioned bully boys (I hope it wasn't with the letter writer's connivance)

The default assumption when seeing a letter published in the Forum is that the letter writer means what he says and sent in the letter voluntarily because he is concerned with or passionate about the issue. Since he has chosen to be published in a public forum, fair comment is thus welcomed and encouraged. If this was not the case, I express my apologies, though I still think that it is the worst letter ever.

I would segue into a homily of "I am ashamed to have come from the same school as the Red Guards, for when I was their age, I didn't set on other people at the drop of a hat", but not everyone agrees that running around screaming with brooms and umbrellas is a better use of one's time (though at least that involved semi-consensual interactions between adolescents, and did not preclude fair comment).

"The criteria for selection of letters in Online Forum remain as vigorous as the printed version's". And I am as handsome as Wo-hen Nankan.