Don't like the grassroots response to immigration? Attempt to eat it out from within.

Well, this was surprising...well, not really.

SINGAPORE: Expect to see more new immigrants to Singapore as community leaders in the future -- the People's Association is planning to induct more of them into the ranks of grassroots leadership.

Currently, some 3,000 new immigrants are grassroots leaders.

They make up nine per cent of Singapore's 33,000-member strong grassroots leadership.

Hah. I thought the whole idea of grassroots organisations was to provide some idea of what people on the ground feel...so if you don't like it, change their makeup so it complies with your revolutionary vision of the future.

Ms Fu said through interaction with others, grassroots leaders can facilitate common understanding, even if it involves the work of dispute resolution.

She said: "We hope to get more people to step forward and represent views of diverse groups so that the government can actually have a more diverse representation, and understand the needs of each community stakeholder better.

"So whether you're a new citizen, old citizen, we'd like you to step forward, do something for the society, and that's how we can get engagement from our citizens."

Of course, firstly, the unquestioned assumption that diversity is automatically Good(TM)m so ingrained in all of us as the modern religion. A culture for everyone, unfortunately, is necessarily a dumbed-down, unremarkable culture, having everything, meaning nothing. It has to appeal to everyone, after all, the underman included, and in doing so loses the point of a culture.

Me? I'm finding all of this quite hilarious. The current culture of Singapore is at best three or four decades old - whatever that was here before the '70s was systematically dismantled and destroyed. The Singapore of today has absolutely no cultural roots in the Singapore of 1812 where Stamford Raffles set foot on this island and instead is stitched and glued together from government policy, social engineering and a subservient populace. When I hear locals complain about Singaporean culture being destroyed and locals being displaced, I have to suppress the urge that we were more than willing to do it to ourselves, after all.

Well, at most we've only lost a couple centuries' worth of history, as opposed to a couple millenniums' worth in the case of Europe. No big loss when you put it into perspective, right?