Just a Game?

Presidential Election in our national media has become the center of debate and has drawn our attentions lately (or at least to my attention). While most of my colleagues are focusing on the contestants, I am drowning at a complete loss. The more I put myself into the loop, the more I was educated nothing but drama queen. My conscience is involuntarily hassled by the fact that all these “performances” are just a game. You may have your own opinion but, still, I think this is one piece of many jokes that absolutely need to be abolished in our culture.

I feel wretched observing one of contestants becomes nicer than used to be just because he desperately needs someone votes him. This class act is just an affair to build public opinion. Someone suddenly has concern on how to increase the lowest wages for buruh. Someone is abruptly screaming why our nation budget for education is so so low. Someone swiftly pays attention on our ocean assets and promise to boost ocean resources in order to facilitate national revenue. All those subjects are not new for us. We knew from the beginning that our budget for education was away below standard. We also knew that our resources in the ocean is enormous, unique, and has been “neglected” (someone else has exploited ours a lot). Why do they now become an expert as if others do not think those issues before? Where have they been? Do they just come back from long sabbatical? It is obvious the cycle of five years is becoming a momentum for raising popularity.

If this is just a game, we can expect no more than seeing winner or loser as the product. Without doing any high order mathematics analysis, I can easily foresee (about 99% sure) there will be problem with ballot vote. Why? It is just back to the nature where win and loss is the master mind of the game. To win the game, they have to bring into play some factors that can be fooled around. And, the ballot vote is, for sure, one (and the biggest contribution) among those factors.

If this is just a game, basically we are wasting billion dollars that is not worth it to fight for since the outcome is just a joke.

In this year election of 2009, will candidates move toward with their first 100-days program again as they proposed 5 years ago? If someone does, then this is another joke. Why again? Our past experiences have advised us, those promises are only lipstick. As typical in campaign, all candidates give their word on intangible things and do not notify on how to achieve it. We people are just nodding in response to their stunning speech. Later on, he or she can annul the promises taking advantage from our weakness, which is forgiveness. That is humiliation.

Politic is part of human life. Human can not ignore it. As riding a horse we need to know how to handle it. Any election (President, Governor, legislative etc) is the summit of the political education process. The bright side about our current system is we have been doing much better since Suharto’s era (1998). The down side, our acceleration is lowly maintained by small group of people who’s weighing on status quo. People with better understanding on the political, economical, governmental, military situation (and much more) are a threat for this elite group. We can not tell who they are, since from the outer surface, those elites may cover with different color of parties, but their thoughts are all the same “maintaining the status quo”.

Human is not perfect. We all are familiar with the term. This imperfectness does not grant an authorization on him/her to do unrealistic action. We are talking about Presidential Election NOT attending circus performances. Yes, we are in the middle of selecting the number one person in the country. We will place our trusts on him/her in the next five years and empower him/her to act on our behalf. The consequence is very immense so definitely this is neither game nor joke. Wallohualam (Prahoro Nurtjahyo, June 25, 2009)