Trust, How Are You?
Trust - a simple word but indeed a key ingredient to ANY relationships: boyfriend-girlfriend, parents-children, husband-wife, neighbours, and oh how it's so critical to the functioning of any good society. Despite the simplicity it may sound, Trust is a concept that is really hard to implement. In any boy-girl relationships, it requires first 'trustable' characteristics--whatever that means to you--records with ex-relationships, parents' marriage, commitment, you name it, it may be endless . In neighbourhood, it requires frequent quality mutual interaction in order 'trust' can be embedded in every soul, to every another soul. In bigger scope, society, trust is never easy. Even trust buil in centuries of civilization can falter in a minute of misconduct.
With trust, there'd be no fear, no worry, carefree in living everyday life. There'd be no use carrying knife everyday to school, There'd be no fear of conducting praying in religion that you believe in in public space. Well, a calm surface doesn't always mean nothing occurs below it. But harmonious-look on the surface would certainly help trust building, wouldn't it?
The surface? yes. The environment, in society plays BIG role. Appereance, on the surface again, is important. One instance where appereance seems to be trivial but truly is crucial in society : It had required New York Government to prove its Broken Windows theory, eliminating wall-graphity act for 6 years until it finally create its default sounder environment. Grafitti, it had believed, was the symbol of the collapse of the system--who would have thought ? who would have bought such idea? but it had proven working. Another on appereance, it's also norm to well-dress yourself when you're trying to stop a car for hitchhiking. No kidding. How would you expect trust to be put on you if you're dressed in dirty clothes and have some odour of 3-days-not-changed socks? Although on the other hand, some instance of banning jilbab in public spaces or university in some countries, does not at all promote trustworthy society, and even cause backlashing anger within.
Where everything is neat, organized, and everybody seems to be living decent life in whatever faith and believe they'd like to live, it's rather easy to built trust. In this part of the world i'm living now, I would not hesitate to hitchhike with anybody on my travel to another country or anywhere nor would I hesitate to accept couchsurf requests or demanding someone's couch to sleep over in my journey. Moreover, one might not hesitate to invite a beggar outside to stay over for the nite (Which I doubt I would do likewise in Jakarta, no matter how angelic I am). There's less worry, and hence, less prejudging. This is a trust built in society--not merely individual trusts. This is rather a kind of trust that people crave to live in--to live in peace.
There's no guarantee that a society where there was no corruption, no bribe nor terorism bombing attempt would really trust one another, either. But where these acts are common, it's next to impossible to build trust. So where's the position of our trust in Indonesia society nowadays? Bhineka Tunggal Ika('Unity in Diversity') that we still endearly praise is a kind of societal concept hardly exist in other nations and it's been builing trust for centuries of civilization in Indonesia. We should hold and live it proudly as well. But still, we cannot close our eyes that the value erodes. There are malicious minds sipping in our brains that aims at separating us apart. I wouldn't say that these crazy bomber guys are Indonesian citizen. They're not educated to be one nor would they try to be one and save the country, they're not loving Indonesia, and more universally, they're not even loving any other human!
Surely what had made them such bloody-bombastic-killers is already a big socioeconomic issue to sort out, but I'd also like to think about how it affects trust. This bombing is not going to make trust more easily built, left alone it's making it much more devastated. Not to mention parties of politics who are using such miserable event to black-sheep other parties! How they're ignorant and instead of fighting againts the terorists they're splitting people apart! This is the least that we need. We need to be together and not let these negatives thoughts of prejudging, doubt, mistrust, sipping in our brain. The lack of trust--despite the personal freedom--wears on people. The lack of trust--with personal freedom--significantly backlashes on society as well! It's becoming more and more essential to keep our head hard and cool while trying to also make our heart warm and softer to embrace, respect and love people-no matter how and from where they belong. If you do respect and love, would you dare to bribe from them? would you dare to terrorize them? would you not trust them? Isn't it--to put it other way--takes much more energy and resources to fight rather than to live in peace?.....But,
a soft heart --loving and embracing alone is not enough of course.
It's no easy task. I'd say first we have to be responsible. If we expect others to be trustworthy, we have to lift ourselves up to be trustworthy in the eyes of those we must live around—and through our actions show them that they should follow suit. For which we need to stop pointing fingers and focus on sharpening our hard skill and making our head harder and cooler as much as our effort to soften (and enlighten!) our heart. Intentions is as useful as a bike for a fish without any action following it. It may as well require 3 more generations to make a really sound, respectful and trustworthy society. But it's nothing impossible no? We have indeed the strong base, we have to keep away the things that makes it stumbling even further and rebuild.
So? let's unite and make a better future for our society! ^^V
hm.. As i'm still living here, it may sound hypocrit or whatever, but I do care and feel utterly sad... :(. hope to walk to talk soon, though
At the moment :
BOOK | Globalization and its discontent, Joseph Stiglitz & Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen's :: MOVIE | Red Dwarf Series :: MUSIC | Brasilian Musics, Eddie Vedder's (He always rocks!)
Labels: thought
