Just Saying | No Happy New Year ahead for Hong Kong, just endless protest chaos for the foreseeable future
- Get used to it, Yonden Lhatoo says, because nothing is changing, nobody is coming to the rescue, and no one has any panacea for the most destructive and debilitating social and political crisis since the city’s return to China
“Please, not the traffic lights this time,” I said to myself as I watched the warriors of the revolution of our times go about liberating Hong Kong on Christmas Eve.
Why the concern about traffic lights, you might ask, when masked hooligans were also blocking roads, digging up bricks, vandalising shops, and hurling petrol bombs in the name of democracy.
Nothing in particular, I guess, other than the fact that they were back to trashing traffic lights just three days after the government announced it had finished painstakingly repairing all 740 that were destroyed to protect our rights and freedoms over the past six months.
And that, folks, pretty much sums up what you can expect of Hong Kong in the new year as we wrap up the second half of 2019 with no end in sight to the most destructive and debilitating social and political crisis since this city returned to Chinese rule more than two decades ago.
Wreck and repair, rinse and repeat. That’s been the new normal for more than half a year now, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Get used to it because nothing is changing, nobody is coming to the rescue, and no one has any panacea, now that the lid has been blown off the Pandora’s box of Hongkongers’ pent-up problems and frustrations.