The coronavirus pandemic is the crisis of a generation, but it can also mould that generation, through a unity achieved by shared experience of an existential ordeal. Outsiders looking at Singapore will use the level of that unity as a yardstick to judge Singaporeans as a people. These two themes were at the forefront of this year's National Day celebrations. Certainly, the mood was subdued. There were no mass celebrations on Sunday. A scaled-down parade in the morning at the Padang featured only about 200 participants, while the indoor evening show had 87 performers. The parade had just four masked contingents occupying less than a third of the Padang, with 150 spectators, a far cry from last year's 27,000-strong audience. However, time-honoured components of the parade were brought to the heartland through parachutists and an aerial display. Also, mobile columns rolled through the streets of towns and housing estates for a second consecutive year to bring the show closer to Singaporeans. All in all, National Day this year remained familiar in spite of it being held against the backdrop of an outbreak that threatened to take the notion of festivity out of the imagination of Singaporeans trying to come to terms with it.
They should not lose heart. The epidemiological crisis helped show the continuity of Singapore life in ways that should shore up people's confidence in themselves. The sacrifices made by healthcare workers and others, who are on the front line of the battle against Covid-19, reveal the tenacious capacity to care for others in spite of the dread of catching the disease themselves. The Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak several years ago elicited a similar response here. In spite of the heavier medical, economic and social weight of Covid-19 this time, the same Singaporean spirit has come to the fore again. This resilience sug-gests that citizens are moulding circumstances even as they are being affected by them. Since Covid-19 looks set to be present for some time to come, the social defences being developed against it, day after day, should become a source of generational immunity to adversity as well.
These instinctive values are important on their own. They touch, too, on the way the world sees Singapore. Foreign partners might not have taken the country seriously had they not thought that citizens and society here were determined and united. This may be true of every country, but the odds always are stacked against the survival of a city state with hardly any natural resources. Singapore's special dependence on a global marketplace demands that it stays fighting fit to survive economic downturns and still preserve enough energy to benefit from an upturn when it arrives, as it must do one day. Despondency, escapism and fatalism have not made Singapore. Resilience remains the order of the day.
