Crazy to squander chance for universal suffrage

'Pocket it first!", the supporters' slogan for the current electoral reform package, always makes me think of pocket money. In my early teenage years I used to get the princely sum of 25 pence (about HK$3) to spend every week as I pleased. But, as everyone knows, there's no such thing as enough money. So, at every opportunity, I used to complain to my parents that all my friends got much more pocket money than me (which, incidentally, wasn't true). But my father wouldn't budge. So, for years, I had to make do with only 25 pence a week.

But what has all this got to do with electoral reform? Well, it strikes me that what I was doing all those years ago was pocketing it first. I may not have agreed with what was on offer, but it was certainly better than nothing. So I took it.

Now, if a teenage boy (and not a particularly smart one) is capable of exercising a degree of pragmatism such as this, then it begs the question, why aren't all our politicians in Hong Kong capable of doing the same? After all politics is meant to be the art of the possible.