Sometimes I wish I could just escape – just fuck off to some remote area where I could make a significant difference to the world. Teach the children in the jungle, conserve endangered species, be a tree-hugger – whatever.

I need a purpose for my life, and right now I feel like I’m going nowhere, and yet my mind is everywhere, thanks to the technology called television which enables me to waste about 60% of my time getting in touch with the world.

And what I find is not to my liking.

I skip the political debates most often, skim the stupid sinetrons and tuned in on the programmes about wildlife and deforestation.

There was a program called Earth from Above which I saw today, and it was showing thousands of baby seals being massacred by human because they think seals mess up the population of fish, making it hard for fishermen to earn their living, even though a research had been done and shown that the seals were not the cause of the lack of fish population, but it was due to human taking more than they should.

When seeing how those baby seals were beaten to death, I cried. I cried so hard as if I’d lost a parent. I felt sick of this world, sick of its cruelty, sick of the way human treat nature and all its habitat. I feel sick to the stomach and I wish I was dead.

I wish I didn’t have to live in this cruel world where the human keep taking and never giving back. Where human think it’s okay to keep murdering animals and ruining their habitats until there’s nothing left, and for what?

For a stupid piece of paper called money.

… or is it really?

The segment above was taken from Baraka, a documentary I’d seen during a research for one of my final year project in university.

Baraka is a movie that was filmed at 152 locations of 24 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Nepal, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States. It contains no dialogue. Instead of a story or plot, the film uses themes to present new perspectives and evoke emotion purely through cinema. The film was the first in over twenty years to be photographed in the 70mm Todd-AO format (Wikipedia).

When all the trees have been cut down,

when all the animals have been hunted,

when all the waters are polluted,

when all the air is unsafe to breathe,

only then will you discover you cannot eat money.

Cree Prophecy

I was sort of interested in to the whole US election thing, mostly because I wanted to see the black man win.

And winning he did – I just saw the breaking news on the telly this afternoon, he won 338 electoral votes over McCain’s 155, which, according to WikiNews, was enough to clinch the presidency of the United States.

What interested me more was the fact that the majority of Indonesian people – 67% of them, according to Kompas.com, and even Indonesia’s Vice President Mr. Jusuf Kalla was voting and expecting Obama to win.

“As we expected and hoped, Senator Barack Obama won the election. Therefore we congratulate him. This phenomena teaches us all that ethnicity, race and other labels are not important. What matters is our capability,” Kalla said, as quoted by Antara news agency and reported from Jakarta Post Online.

Knowing that the majority of Indonesians, although they didn’t get to vote, still chose to support Obama showed good signs – Obama, from my personal opinion, is a charismatic person who knows how to touch people’s hearts. He talks of what matters and what is important and he doesn’t get sucked in to the whole name-calling game that McCain and Palin had done during their election campaign. He has a great vision to unite the American people, no matter what race they come from and bring change to the country, as well as hope for a better nation.

If the majority of Indonesian people could recognize those attributes that have been displayed by Obama, then it must mean that we, as Indonesians, are smart enough to choose our leaders, despite their races or the places they come from.

So why is it not happening in Indonesia? Why do Indonesians are able to see clearly the great hope for the change in America, and not our own country?

How ironic was it when Mr. Kalla said ‘ethnicity, race and other labels are not important. What matters is our capability’ while at the same time he was just talking straight out of his own ass, because in reality, Indonesia still take those aspects seriously. Being an Indonesian president in Indonesia is all about ethnicity, race, and other labels – those are what considered to be important.

So if the American people can vote for the minority and trust their country in the hands of one, then why can’t Indonesian people do the same?