Can we actually make changes?

Shit, in the plural form, have been happening back home.

In a democratic country, the first thing that comes to mind whenever there is discontent in the population is protests. Assemble, march, shout society’s grievances with your comrade. Peacefully. The catch is that peaceful protests generally lead nowhere. Case in point is Kamisan, a weekly protest held continuously for decades that hasn’t yielded any concrete results.

Why you might ask, when all the silk batik-clad men on TV say that if the protests are peaceful they will surely listen. Let’s play make believe. Imagine yourself a humble elected member of DPR going to your workplace. As you dismount from your state-paid European car, you hear the periodical noise of the peaceful public from beyond the tall fences. You squinted your eyes out of discomfort but you see men in uniforms standing guard, legally allowed to inflict force upon your constituents if the need should arise. You feel relieved and safe, and so you forget those bothersome noise because you figure they would get tired anyway and they would eventually have to go home and go back to work any second. So you go on your way to another nap meeting to dream about your next work visit to Japan, midway through the entrance you have probably forgotten there was a crowd to begin with.

Protests usually persist. Demanding those they have elected to stay true to their promises. Unfulfilled promises then fuel anger. Anger heats up and reaches boiling point. Non-violence stops becoming the sole option, or rather non-violence stops becoming an option. Rocks start to get thrown, harsh words get exchanged. Disruption spreads and people, not just those who took on the street, begin to feel the reality of the situation.

You, our made up noble parliamentarian, forcefully got woken up from your afternoon nap because some lazy students have started climbing the fence. You clutched your Mikimoto pearls you bought last time in Ginza, then picked up your phone to see your loyal donator who has provided a great number of below minimum wage jobs in your constituency complained that their workers have been missing work because of the prolonged protests. The disruption is now personal. You and your fellow parliamentarians ring the bell. Like clockwork, the police is alerted and weapons take center stage. Every swing of a baton, every rubber bullet, slowly pushes the loud voice back into silence. If somehow the brutality of the so-called “pelindung masyarakat” is insufficient, you send in provocateurs to split the protesters’ ranks then ridiculously blame the innocents with the crime of burning the exact train station they depend on for their livelihood, the same train station they need for their assembly. If! If still the youths are insistent on their resistance, the government still has another card up their sleeve: threatening a junta if necessary.

“Practice the virtue of democracy! Stop the ruckus and elect good people!” one might suggest. Reformasi has certainly given us more say in how the government is conducted and obviously electing good people is a possibility, but at the same time we tend to overlook the fact that voting is difficult¹. We have numerous political parties each with their numerous candidates. A voter is demanded to balance their and their community’s interests while simultaneously measuring the competency of all the candidates along with the feasibility of their ideas and policies. This is a lot of work and study. Fostering good citizenship requires good education. Yet how can we achieve this when many teachers are still making far below the minimum wage?². The state spends at least 20% of the national budget annually but some performance indicators still show the quality of education in Indonesia worsening and below average³.

Also, don’t forget that popular democracy, as its name suggests, is a popularity contest. Let’s imagine that you, the honorable member of parliament seeks reelection. Which one would you find easier: going town to town engaging with critical voters pointing out the holes in your policies, or holding dangdutan with the people of your hometown to secure their votes while dancing with an AI generated mascot of yours? It is not surprising then that people in power resent the educated because it is much easier for them to cling to and grab power when people outside your palatial mansion remain intellectually subdued (if possible also in a perpetual state of hunger), unable to make a long-term decision beneficial to themselves.

Education comes in many forms in this day and age, it is not strictly limited to the one we have behind the desk in a class. The recent Peringatan Darurat and the pink-green (I don’t know the name of the current wave) movement have shown that social media is a great tool for people to spread educational content and assemble. But even here we can’t overlook that behind these funny cute apps on our phone are the usual suspects, the mega corporations. When presented with the options of either helping the oppressed or cooperating with those in power, capitalists have historically always chosen the latter. For example, during the current wave of protests, the government has allegedly requested these companies to block access to some of their features⁴.

I, who have never personally protested in the streets, may seem to just be pessimistically complaining that whatever actions people have undertaken so far have achieved nothing. Of course not, that is not what this rambling text has been trying to convey. Indonesia has clearly improved bit-by-bit (there is a bankrupting high-speed train for example, also on-going budget-wasting new capital that no one requested). At the same time, we can’t deny that there are aspects of the Indonesian life that are still stuck in the colonial days. Widespread bribery is unchanged, cronyism to reach most things, state-supported paramilitary groups whose social function I have never comprehended still exist. You name it.

The objective of whatever you call this is to gather my thoughts, illustrate my views, and most importantly to humbly ask anyone kind enough to spend their time reading this if they could enlighten me on the topic of activism and if possible to teach me about ways that I can contribute.