October 28th: The Youth Pledge Day

HOW TO MAINTAIN THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH PLEDGE DAY? On 28th October 2007 we coinciding with the 79th Youth Pledge Day. Relevant to that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called on the people, especially the youth, to develop the culture of maintaining health and the habit of doing physical exercises in order to be able to win the global competition. The president in the company of First Lady Ani Yudhoyono made the call at a function launching the Movement of Indonesian Healthy Youth here Sunday 28th.

"The youth and teenagers should keep doing physical exercises, maintaining health, being creative, maintaining harmony among them, avoiding narcotics and violent acts as well as averting free intercourse to safe the future, make them leading young generation and develop the nation, the president said on The Jakarta Post.

The president said the government would continue to carry out programs to make the Indonesian people remain healthy by providing funds needed for the purpose.

On the commemoration of the Youth Pledge Day, the head of state called on the younger generation to maintain the spirit of the Youth Pledge in order that they and the Indonesian people in general would be leading in the globalization era towards the prosperous future.

Meanwhile, Youth and Sports Minister Adhyaksa Dault said the launching of the movement was a strategic momentum to improve the condition of the Indonesian young people.

He said the effort to invite young people to have the pattern of living healthily still faced some problems including the fact that many plots of land which should be made as public facilities and sports activities were converted into shopping centres among other things.
For the youth Oath of 1928, we are grateful for the consciousness of those young students in Batavia who put all their sectarian interests behind them for a bigger dream, the dream of Indonesia. Bramantyo Prijosusilo, from Ngawi, East Java wrote on the JP, that from that date Indonesians began to exist and posses a dream of a new culture, a culture that encompasses everything good from all the cultures among the many ethnic groups that live in the archipelago, but also recognizes the modern world as an equal, and Bahasa Indonesia began to earnestly develop Indonesia's nationalism.
Anthropologist Ben Anderson once wrote of being puzzled by the fact that so many Javanese writers write in Indonesian even though they speak Javanese in intimate situations, and a current analysis of spoken Javanese would show that the indigenous language now borrows heavily from not only the archipelago's lingua franca but also from English and IT-speak.
Much of what was Javanese is now being forgotten by the general population and has become a specialist field that interests academics. If there is a perceived danger of globalization wiping out local cultures, the spread and usage of Bahasa Indonesia here has proved to affect local languages in much the same way.
Our founding fathers often emphasized that our nationalism is part of internationalism and is based on humanity. From the beginning nationalism here set out not to be the foremost among nations. We wished only to exist among other nations as brothers and sisters and not as slaves, coolies or poor cousins.
The youths of 1928 knew of the dangers that nationalism could breed. They must have been relieved when in hindsight they reflected on their actions of 1928 and found that the seeds they planted had grown without running wild like nationalism under Hitler.
Every so often, the danger of over-boiling nationalism used as a political wild card to create social conflict looms up and shows its ugly face in the form of racial or ethnic conflict in this country. Fortunately, a Javanese would say, we have been lucky: All the times Indonesia's society seemed to be ripping apart at the seams, we pulled through.
Reflecting on our often violent history it is amazing that we are still here at all. We have had many political killings, more than enough religious conflict, racial violence, cruel military operations against residents and several economic near-collapses, but we are still here today, with one country, one nation and one language, and nationalism here still has a good name.
We are fortunate to have many activists who consciously strive to produce Indonesian literature, Indonesian music, Indonesian art, just as we have people who are studying and developing our traditional arts. As globalization is diluting our identity and merging it into one worldwide image we have our Indonesian-ness and our ethnicities to give us an essential system of values that allows us to not only imagine ourselves as unique, but also essentially full of virtue.
When we feel confident, we are a big-hearted nation capable of offering real support to others less fortunate than us. When we are bewildered by the changes enveloping every aspect of our lives, we feel small and act petty. The way we went over the top when we ranted against Malaysia for the brutality of a couple of policeman against an Indonesian sports official there recently shows how things easily get out of proportion when nationalism as an emotion is given fuel.
Surely we know that there are brutal elements in every police force in the world, and that the actions of some individuals is not the responsibility of the state or the government. But when Malaysia is involved we get all emotional and blur the boundaries in our minds. Perhaps recently we have been feeling small.
As a concept of identity that encompasses local disciplines and knowledge, nationalism has served us well. As an emotion nationalism often misleads to disastrous consequences. It is one thing for nationalism to, for instance, spur on a scientist to solve the problems of Jakarta's pollution, floods and congestion, but another story completely when nationalism calls for blood to pay for a perceived insult or injury against us.
In the first case nationalism becomes a positive force that calls an individual's dedication to some noble cause, but in the latter, nationalism is no more than a negative feeling, akin to jealousy, fear or hatred, and can only breed suffering.
When we talk about one country, one nation and one language, we should be saying that with the Indonesian dream in mind. At all costs we should avoid the Indonesian nightmare. If we dream of Indonesia as a country that is just and prosperous, the Indonesian nightmare is a fascist country where everything is centralized and there is only one voice ever heard, be it the voice of a strong military man, neo-conservative global powers or the voice of literalist religion, or an unholy alliance of the three.
We want an Indonesia that is united by its lively diversity and not by fear or force.