page  3  2  1

Jan 31, 2002. Santi Ayu, mahasiswi UI, Jakarta

Hi Elwin, excellent! Saya sekarang belajar biologi dan lingkungan di UI, tapi saya juga tertarik dengan masalah seperti ini. Informasi ini berguna untuk kita-kita. Sekarang ini saya aktif di kelompok diskusi tentang lingkungan dan pembangunan. Apakah kamu percaya demokrasi? Coba kamu baca dan pelajari Anarchism. Kita tidak butuh demokrasi tetapi anarchism. Saya mengikuti diskusi di sini bagaimana negara-negara barat menggunakan demokrasi sebagai alasan mereka untuk menguasai dunia. Kalau kamu ada pertanyaan tentang itu hubungi saya.

Jan 30, 2002. Roy, mahasiwa, Bandung

Pak Elwin, saya setuju dengan pendapat Bapak. Sekarang ini yang kurang adalah dana dan informasi untuk bisa sekolah ke luar negeri. Kalau Bapak ada dana dan informasi saya minta tolong di kasih tahu ya. Teman-teman saya sudah banyak yang kekurangan dana untuk meneruskan kuliah mereka di sini. Jadi bukan ide yang kurang sekarang dana yang perlu. Di sini banyak sekali peminta-minta. Indonesia juga sekarang jadi peminta-minta ke IMF. Benarkan?

Terima kasih.

Roy, 

saya kira tidak usah sebut Bapak, lebih baik panggil nama saja. Benar, Indonesia sekarang ini jadi peminta-minta. Sebetulnya dari dulu juga. Makanya sekarang kita menumpuk hutang yang sangat hebat jumlahnya. Kalau di dalam negeri banyak peminta-minta, saya tidak heran karena situasi yang tetap tidak kunjung baik. 

Kenapa banyak peminta-minta? Itu sebenarnya tidak lepas dari strategi kebijakan pembangunan nasional kita yang tidak beres. Kita tahu manusia di Indonesia banyak. Banyak dari mereka petani dan kurang pendidikan. Banyak dari mereka tinggal di daerah pedesaan. Tetapi pembangunannya tidak di arahkan ke sana yaitu untuk membantu usaha tani, mengembangkan perdagangan hasil-hasil pertanian dan membantu industri yang menggunakan bahan baku dari hasil pertanian. Lucu, karena banyak produk yang bahan bakunya adalah hasil pertanianan justru kita impor dari luar. Mimpi Indonesia adalah membangun kapal terbang. Ini memang debat lama tapi kita tidak bisa memperbaiki keadaan sekarang kalau tidak tahu darimana sebabnya. Orang mau melupakan itu, itu tidak bisa. Sumberdaya yang digunakan untuk itu sudah sangat hebat jumlahnya dan sekarang tidak jelas pertanggung jawabannya.

Soal informasi untuk sekolah di luar negeri, ini adalah salah satu upaya dari Institute ini. Nanti akan ada representasi di Jakarta dan kota lainnya yang kalian kalau perlu informasi tinggal kontak. 

Apakah ide atau dana? Dua-duanya sangat perlu sekarang ini. Indonesia tidak bisa hanya dibangun dengan dana. Dana bisa dengan cepat dikorupsi dan dimanipulasi. Bisa ditransfer kemana-mana secara rahasia. Ide, meskipunbisa tetapi jauh lebih susah dan di era Internet sekarang, hampir tidak ada lagi ide-ide yang bisa disembuyikan. 

Yang saya maksud dengan ide bukan hanya gagasan-gagasan liar seperti ucapan-ucapan para komentator di koran-koran dan televisi. Umumnya mereka berkata di sana untuk popularitas tanpa memikirkan konsekuensi ucapan mereka. Dan kalau kamu perhatikan kebanyakan mereka juga sangat bias dalam memberikan komentar. Bisa bias terhadap kelompoknya, bias yang menuduh pemerintah salah semua, dan bisa karena kurang pengetahuan.

Ide yang saya maksud adalah ajakan, bukan omongan. Ajakan kerjasama, ajakan untuk bersikap kritis, ajakan untuk berpikir dan bersikap secara demokratis, dan ajakan untuk berbuat sesuatu menolong yang miskin dan kurang berpendidikan di sana. Kalau sampai sekarang masih sebatas ajakan atau berkesan omongan, itu karena masih tahap inisiasi dan penggugahan. Untuk menggugah semangat orang, untuk memberikan orang pandangan-pandangan, dan lain sebagainya.
Anda sebagai pelajar silahkan praktekkan ajakan-ajakan tersebut. Demonstrasi okay asal jangan sampai merusak, membakar dan melukai bahkan membunuh orang lain. Demonstrasi yang damai, tertib dan yang punya tujuan jelas adalah bagus. Tujuan jelas misalnya: supaya keadilan ditegakkan, ekonomi ditangani dan lain sebagainya. Jangan demonstrasi yang hanya membuat sekolompok masyarakat jadi takut termasuk yang menyangkut hubungan antar bangsa. 

Elwin

Jan 30, 2002. Emma, commodity broker, Jakarta

Elwin, ini keren…mendidik. Ternyata ada juga orang Indonesia disana yang peduli ya. Keep up the good work! Best regards.

Hi Emma,

Terima kasih. Di sini, sama seperti di Indonesia, saya kira tidak sedikit yang peduli dengan keadaan Indonesia. Hanya saja karena situasinya tampaknya sangat berat sehingga setiap orang merasa overwhelmed dan memilih untuk tidak berbuat apa-apa. Sehingga kadang-kadang muncul ucapan, “bosan dengan berita tentang Indonesia karena buruk semua”. Mereka tentu benar. Tetapi daripada apatis dan cuek, lebih baik berbuat sesuatu meski kecil dan belum kelihatan pengaruhnya sekarang, kalau dilakukan dengan persistence (giat) saya kira akan berguna banyak.Jangan salah juga, ada beberapa kelompok dan orang yang tetap melakukan sesuatu. Kepada mereka saya tentu berharap supaya upayanya diteruskan. Dan kalau bisa saling kerjasama, itu jauh lebih baik.

Elwin

Jan 29, 2002. Linda Sari, Jakarta (Since the comment is quite long, I decided to separate them into several parts)

Dear Elwin,
I have to tell you that I’m very impressed with your apparent fervor as reflected through your website. Let alone after knowing that you started and continue your works motivated by your own vision, which seems to develop and being shaped from your personal experiences, but unlike the others, you treasured so much that you utilize them for a greater good. This reminds me about myself. No, I’m not trying to compare your achievements with mine, for in many aspects I’m far behind you. But, let me tell you a little background about myself before I dare to give comments about your writings (as you yourselves encouraged me to do:-). I am as mad as you with our country. I am furious to see how our rich country turns to be so poor just because the miss-management of its incompetent people. I left my comfort zone in P&G about two years ago and decided to do something about it, starting from getting more education in the area that I think I could contribute most, finance, diverted from my engineering background. 

I got my MBA in finance from AIM, the Philippine and Stockholm School of Economics. Now, I’m teaching finance in Trisakti while searching for S2 (in financial engineering) or S-3 scholarship from outside the campus. In my S1 almamater, ITB, I established a foundation (it’s been its 4th year now) to achieve two things. For short-term, I have established a committee to handle scholarship program – a kind of ‘poverty alleviation’ activity, and entrepreneurship development. For long-run mission, it’s a kind of world-view development where we will hold discussion forum to talk about various topics which I envision to encourage ITB students to address social issues from multi-dimentional perspectives. Basically, the later is to invite these students to step out from their silos or fragmented departments, and to challenge them to think, to speak up and dare to disagree agreeably, or in other words to bring democracy back to campus. 

Since it’s our 4th year, we think that it’s about time to start this session, so this coming April is the targeted time, although we’re still working on the topics. I notice that you also care about the young generation. That’s another similarity. But, perhaps, I’m not as focused with my target and definitely not as fervent, for you have already set a targeted output – young people equipped with necessary knowledge to contribute something in the anticipation of the 2004 election – or at least that I perceived it as your short-term target. Perhaps, I need to ask you how you’re gonna go about it – what kind of steps have you taken or will you take to achieve your short & long-term target? I also notice that one of your means to achieve it is through live meeting discussion. BTW, who is your target audience – local/international students/professionals, level of education, etc? I just want to share you something about what I perceived as the common sentiment of most university students here. 

They are now I think in the state of acute indifference due to many reasons: -   severe competition in job market
- pressure from the rector who’s taking away subsidy if students exceed the 4-year school period. In short, this is due to economic pressure as the impact of our pro-longed national crisis.
But still, nothing beat the seemingly unresolved cases involving high-ranking individuals (both in politics and business) for being the source of this nation-wide mental lethargy in the mind of our young generations.

For instance, although I initiated the forum four years ago, only recently the idea embraced by many.
As for you then, what would be your strategy to motivate these young generation given these situation?

Dear Linda,

Thank you for your comment and questions. I certainly see your background and experience far better than mine. I really hope that your forum will be able to attract more people and it’ll continuously develop so that benefits our society as a whole. We need various frontiers in this fight, a fight against intolerance (narrow-mindedness), ignorance and ill-informed young people. The more people involve and do something useful in other frontiers, the more effective our efforts and the faster we can change the country for better. Perhaps someday we will be living in any part of the world, but when we see people in Indonesia living in harmony and prosperity, we would have a joyous feeling.
Now you ask me: what steps have I taken or will I take to achieve my short & long-term target?

To tell you the truth, I am really concerned of the 2004 election. There are a lot of things that can happen. We might expect that it could be a key momentum in laying down a strong foundation for Indonesia in the 21st century. But to our unfortunate it seems it’s more likely to be a disaster to the nation’s future. I am not talking about who is going to win or not, but my concern is whether we will have politicians with better vision of the future of the country, better equipped, in terms of education, knowledge and commitment to people, and better morality. If the 1999 election was an exercise and a warming up, the 2004 one will be a real test. We have witnessed how low the morality of our house representatives, political leaders and bureaucrats is. We have also witnessed how narrow their mission and vision are – see how they play childish games in such a high position (no interest whatsoever for the nation’s future except for the party and family). We have seen how weak their learning and training backgrounds are (from some of them we can’t even expect to produce a systematic and structured way of thinking, let alone to think a complicated national and international affairs). And we have witnessed how poor their commitments to people are. I am not talking all of them, but majority of them. As people say garbage in - garbage out, we could not expect too much if most of the future law-makers would be the unqualified individuals in terms of those factors I mentioned above. According to a comment I received from Bandung, every people now seem just to wait for 2004. I think he is right. In fact everybody seems just play a wait and see game. The game is: put aside corruption investigation, forget about economic recovery agenda and who cares about people, but let’s think about how to win votes in 2004. 

This is a way of thinking of someone who hardly uses his rational thinking. They think the end, without knowing the beginning because they assume they can exploit it later on. Yes, they assume they can ‘exploit’ ill-informed and poor people. Of course, as the golden rule says, do unto others if you want them to do the same to you, the surest way to win is actually to feed people, to bring order and restore justice. But that’s not in their main agenda. If the future election fails to produce the result that people want, then we could no longer wait until 2009 since by that time Indonesia’s already collapsed and other countries have already far advanced. 

But thanks to the ‘democratic’ system we have. The incapable people can only win if they are successful in manipulating ill-informed and poor people. Those unfortunate people are weak enough to know who is the beast and who is the best. They are tired and have no energy to think about who is actually going to fight for their welfare and who is actually going to fight for his own welfare. That leaves the question to the young and well-equipped generation. Can and are they willing to distinguish the beast from the best. Majority of them perhaps not able or not willing, but one of the main reasons is due to the lack of information about the real problems we are facing. Another factor is due to the lack of cooperation among them. Lack of cooperation, especially across races, ethnic groups and religion, tends to create antagonism. The young people who are actually well educated but lack cooperation, association and relationship with others could be dangerous for unity and harmony and as a result they are less likely to use their rational judgment in channeling their votes.

This is the background of the short-term goal.
Now, how can I achieve that? My first answer is it’s impossible to achieve it alone. I or we need a network and since we are living in the Internet age, the fastest way to create a network is through the Internet. Again, for not to misunderstood, this network is not for me, but for the young generation of the country. This is a forum for us: to exchange our ideas, to share our experience, to strengthen our cooperation with people of different backgrounds, to disseminate democratic messages and to help the ill-informed people. Therefore, this site is just a starting point to have a network. 

Having said that, it’s impossible to list all the steps one by one here. But once people agree with this mission and they want to participate, then we become part of the network. Then each or some of the members can organize things that can advance our mission. It’s sort of a mass organization. But the mass organizations in Indonesia today are completely out of context. We can acquire resources to help others. We can print our democratic and united messages and disseminate them through out the country. We can use many channels to do that. We combine our messages with action. Also, we need to encourage young people to form other similar groups, but perhaps more specialized in certain aspects. Again, we need to attack the problem from many frontiers. But of course their goals have to converge to the advancement of the nation. For the long-run, I have not put much thought on this except I envision there will be a strong second opinion and independent institute in Indonesia where people from different ethic groups, races and religion can work together. As you perhaps see today, everybody tends to do everything primordially, either by race, ethnic group or religion. This is very dangerous!

Your next question is: what would be your strategy to motivate these young generation given these situation?

An interesting question. Given the situation you describe above, the option for us is actually not much. Let me describe the general situation today in regards to the environment the young people/students are facing and their attitude toward it.

There are ignorance people. Whatever you said, they will never really pay attention to it.
There are unconcerned people. Whatever you said, they never care about it.
There are also intolerance, prejudice or narrow-mindedness young people. Whatever you said, they don’t believe in you. There are also antagonist people. Whatever you said, they just hate it.
There are also skeptical people. Whatever you said, they always consider it as impossibility.
But there are cooperative and supportive people. Whatever you said that is good to people, they will embrace it and support you.

As always, when you deal with such situation, think about history and other sources that you might think relevant. If there are still good people around, you will never give up your good intention. Environment is secondary after a will as the famous line says there is a will, there is a way.

As you might guess, the real challenge is to communicate with the young generation who are now studying or living abroad. They enjoy the freedom in the country they live. They see less real life stories in Indonesia. They have little exposure to the real life of Indonesian people as most of them come from middle and upper class. Most of them are less concerned with others, let alone with people who they don’t really know. They think that whatever circumstances might happen in Indonesia, they still can survive pretty well. In other words, majority of them are in the first four of the above categories. On the other hands, they, aware or unaware, create a massive flow of money out of the country. So, if they happen in the first four of the category, how bad do you think the situation?

Also, whether they are or not, they are considered as fortunate young Indonesian people who will, one way or another, be expected to contribute to the advancement of the country. People may deny, but the fact of the matter is in most cases the young people who never have such opportunity are looking up to them. They expect them to behave differently (I mean for better). They expect them to think differently (for better) and they expect them to be more rational. If we don’t find such attitude and qualifications, how bad do you think the situation? We may plan to live in a place we like, but we can never erase from our memory that we were born or raised up in the country. As human beings, I believe we have a moral obligation or religion mandate that inspire us to do something for the people in the country. But to do that individually will less likely influence the dominant way of thinking that tends to impoverish others. That’s why we need cooperation. 

Best regards,
Elwin

Jan 27, 2002. Debby dari Pontianak, Indonesia

Saya tertarik dengan artikel Pengangguran Tenaga Terdidik tetapi saya tidak sependapat kalau dibilang lapangan kerja sangat terbatas. Lowongan selalu banyak di koran-koran. Cuma yang dicari adalah yang sudah berpengalaman jadinya sulit buat yang belum ada pengalaman. Padahal yang sudah berpengalaman tidak lebih baik kerjanya. 

(Saya berharap ada komentar dari pembaca)

Back to top

Last updated 2/26/02