I.. I don't want trouble..

Since Jakartass wrote about us on November 22, more of you have visited - and hopefully read - our blog. (we therefore thank you, Jakartass, for spreading the words). And since then too, we receive more and more comments from you. They are all great. We love them.

Some emails came in response to our blog "They wear suits" (if you do not know what we are talking about, maybe you should read it first). Many of which expressed deep simpathy to Joni and what he went through. For that we thank you.

Among those emails, we found one particularly interesting and we would like to share it with you. The email came from a lawyer. Basically what he said in the email was: "What the security guards did to Joni was against the law. If you have some kind of proof and witness to support the allegation, I can help you to hold the guards and the building management responsible." Wow. Just reading that gave us goosebumps. And some more: He will do it pro bono for Joni. Very nice of him. His name, phone number and address checked out, so we concluded he is for real.

Our first thought was, if we keep this thing rolling, it is going to get really interesting! But then after that few seconds of hype, logic set in. The incidence happened a few months ago, Joni has no proof, no witness, nothing. It will be his words against theirs. He has no case. Darn.

But since the whole story is about Joni, we thought we should involve Joni in the decision making, so we went to him. We told him about all the attention he got, all the email showing the heart-felt simpathy, and then about the lawyer. Guess how he reacted to it.
He turned pale and said: "I.. I.. don't want trouble.." You could see the fear in his eyes. Now that is NOT exactly the response we were looking for. Joni went on: "I.. I am just a slave, I know nothing. I just want to live in peace...." and so on.

A slave? Oh, come on Joni. Surely it is just a figure of speech, but still. Historically Indonesia endured 350 years of Dutch occupation. We were slaves then. And then three and a half years of Japanese occupation. We were slaves then too. And here we are now, more than sixty years after our independence, we still think we are slaves.

Ironically, on that same day, we had just spent the whole morning in an unbearably-long meeting with some government officials regarding one of our project. And we were tired of having to watch some of them acting as if they were (little) kings. Decisions made based on the mood of the day, schedules changed based on whims, money spent like it grows on trees*. Well, we had the kingdom of Sri Vijaya in the 7th century AD, so we had kings then. And then of course the kingdom of Majapahit from 1300 to early 16th century. We had kings then too. And here we are now, more than sixty years after our independence, and we are still ruled by kings.

What is going on here. If you ask us right now, to name one thing that desperately need fixing in our country, then this is it. Our mentality. Because we either have a 'slave mentality' or a 'king mentality'. Both are just as bad.
Why not have something in between for a change. We are not kings, we are not slaves. We are we. We are all the same.
An 'in between' mentality. In-between is good enough, ain't it?

Anyway, back to Joni. In the end he urged us not to write anything about him ever again. He said he just wants to live his life in peace. He wants to forget everything and move on.

He forced us to promise him that there will be no more blog about him. So my dear friends, this will be the last time we write about Joni.

We will keep our promise for sure, because we.. we.. don't want trouble.. (from Joni).

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PS: To all of you who have been kind enough to drop us a line:
cindy, hasan_sat, shakiras lover, boboakunting, mia565#, mariam s., happy_pappy: thank you for the words of simpathy.
deni9875# : Yes, Joni is a real name.
kudalari, wawan21#, eva_t : Thank you but Joni does not accept donation, at least not at this time. Thank you for caring.
ananda, ym_fitri : Yes, Joni is married with 3 kids. 1 girl and 2 twin boys.
(Note: some names are obfuscated to protect the privacy)

* we urge you not to generalize and think that all government officials are like what we describe above. We just happened to stumble on some.
There is a lot of good officials out there who work hard to make this country better, and they have our sincere admiration.
The officials we were talking about are the 'bad apples', and in the basket there are more good apples than bad (but sometimes the basket needs some shakings so the good ones can emerge.)

Feedback: indonesia.anonymus at gmail dot com