That was the message I woke up to this morning.

A reminder: I’m in Singapore, the message was sent from my boss who is a Singaporean.

This made me jump on the computer and look it up on Swedish media, thinking, if it’s in the media at home, then I can get a sense of how big of a deal it is back there. Only because national and international media can be quite different.

To my disappointment, it’s featured pretty big…

BACKTRACKING TIME!

I remember a few days ago, I saw on my Facebook feed from my friends about things I didn’t really pay attention to, which now makes more sense. So I went back and posted a status, asking what’s going on back home.

Then I went back to the media and started reading, back tracking articles etc.

SUMMARY

So the short summary is that 12 May 2013 a civilian man was shot by the police in a suburb of Stockholm.

The man died and the wife, who he was shot in front of is traumatized. I’m not going into details, as I know those articles and reports aren’t very trustworthy, but the general thing is that the police thought there was a threat since the man was holding a knife.

This resulted in protests by the youths in the form of setting cars on fire and it’s spreading to other suburbs of Stockholm.

I love my home country, which is Sweden. I love my hometown, which is Stockholm.

No matter if I’m ethnically from Vietnam and China, lived in Germany, Australia and now Singapore, I’ve always carried a love and pride to be Swedish and can call such a beautiful city like Stockholm my home.

To hear and read about this, hurts. It literally hurts! Why? Because Sweden has to me and what I’ve been exposed to, one of the best values as a country to live in and I’m not alone for thinking that. Check out the major blogs about this and you’ll see.

I get angry, cause it’s about 40 people, causing and doing this violence. Not many at all, but I get angry about the effect they’ve caused.

I hate this action and I don’t support this protest at all. I understand where they claim it comes from: a protest against the police for shooting an innocent man, but I think it’s bullshit. A load of crap.

I don’t think they have a clue about their actions and the consequences. It’s not thought through. Even if in the future it ends up me being wrong and they actually had a great insight. I’ll still stand by this statement. Which should say a lot cause it means that whatever they’re trying to have said, it’s not coming through!!

I don’t believe in violence. Never have and never will.

This group doing this are barely young adults, I doubt they have any profound idea of their mission.

I think this is a bad excuse for them to act out in a horrible way. Cause they’re having issues.

If you want to improve our society and question the police, make someone responsible to make sure this don’t happen again. To speak up about this tragedy. I support you, but just the fact that there are cars burning at this multiple places and no comments from their side just says that they have nothing to say! You got the attention, so now use REAL actions and words to make things better. Don’t run away and go and damage and cause more violence somewhere else!!

NONSENSE!

The  affirmation of that I think that it’s completely ridiculous and that confirmed my outlook on this is that at some places, there were people throwing rocks on the professionals putting out the fire!

NOW WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!?!?!

IDIOCY!

It’s like they have issues and they’re using any reason/excuse to vent it.

One wrong don’t make another wrong right.

By the way, if you by any chance wanted to protest and turn on the police and what not, trying to force them to take the responsibility of what happened. Then you’re on the completely wrong track. Cause instead of pointing out and reflecting over the mistakes the police made and going from there, you are now taking that focus away from them and targeting something completely different; these car burning events instead. Way to go! (not really)

I get SO angry and frustrated!

I praise Sweden a lot for being a great place to live in, but certainly it’s not perfect. Nothing is, but why I still stick to my beliefs is because it has a good foundation to improve.

It’s a place where you don’t need violence to make a point! You can talk, write or whatever that is non-violent to HELP make it an even better place to live in. If all you can do is to cause more damage once one has been done, then you don’t value or care about the country or city. You’re just an immature, incapable confused idiot trying to express something that you need to figure out what it is cause it has nothing to do with this event.

STOP making up and find excuses for your violence or ill behavior and pretend you’re doing something noble.

It sickens me..!

OK, need to take a chill pill for now…this is so upsetting!