Two days later, Sharon took the lectern in parliament and gave the speech that had been vetted thrice by Elvis and Yu Chin. She related her recent walkabout in Little India where she noticed that the migrant worker crowd had again swelled to levels of pre-riot days. This was a cause for concern. Congregations of such high density were walking time bombs and public disorder incidents waiting to happen. The majority of the migrant workers that visited Little India came from villages and towns in third world countries. They did not receive the kind of education that would equip them to participate responsibly in a civil society. They left their beer cans and liquor bottles lying around on the grass patches where they drank and they ogled local women. The riot that occurred several weeks ago provided clear evidence of the disorder these lowly-educated migrant workers were capable of. It was imperative that stricter regulations were put in place to safeguard the people of Singapore. Sharon proposed that the parliament revisit her earlier proposal to fence up areas in Little India and designate them out of bounds to migrant workers. She also proposed that a police check point be set up at the car park where the busloads of migrant workers were dropped off by the dormitory operators. These migrant workers should be made to register with the police and receive a coloured armband that allowed them a sixty-minute slot to conduct their shopping. Once the allotted number of armbands were issued, late-arriving migrant workers would have to wait on the bus for the next sixty-minute slot to be open. That would be the most cost-effective method to control the crowds in Little India and diffuse the potential time bomb.

As Elvis so accurately predicted, both Rashid Rahman and Jowene Tay took to the microphone and tore Sharon down. Has Singapore become so callous a society that we segregate people and restrict the lower stratum access to public areas? Is the governing power so elitist that it automatically assumes migrant workers from Third World countries cannot behave themselves and need to be restrained with an armband while they are in public? And what an abomination it is to call congregations of hardworking migrant workers walking time bombs! Both Rashid Rahman and Jowene Tay went on record to demand that Sharon Shi apologise to the migrant worker community.

That was the five-cherry jackpot line-up that Elvis had hoped for.

Within hours after the parliament debates were telecast, an online war erupted. The liberals threw Sharon into the pit of shame and stoned her with unrestrained invectives and demeaning memes. Everyone in their camp demanded Sharon to apologise. The conservatives rallied around her and shielded her with excuses. She might have picked the wrong words but her message was not incorrect. The safety of Singaporeans should always come first. The furore only died down three days later, after Sharon had made a public apology for her inappropriate choice of words.