I was about to open my Yahoo email account and the Yahoo homepage had this news about how Ariel Peterpan cried when he celebrated his birthday in jail. Out of curiosity I clicked the link. It was nothing special but what’s interesting is the comments people were posting underneath the story. I was shocked to find so many people expressing their anger to Ariel. Not just anger, it was extreme anger. The kind of anger you feel towards a person who did nasty things to your loved ones or yourself.
They wrote something along the line of “Jail is too soft a punishment for him, Ariel should be stabbed to death/stoned to death,”
Now, I can understand if that kind of anger was directed to a pedophile, but wishing someone whose sex tapes were leaked to public to be stoned to death is a bit extreme don’t you think? And it wasn’t just an opinion of one or two people, it was a lot of them.
What’s those sex tapes got to do with them really? If anything those tapes were entertaining. He shouldn’t apologize to us for making them, we should apologize to him for making an entertainment out of it.
For me, what he did wasn’t even a crime, it was just an unfortunate and extremely embarrassing incident. He shouldn’t have been jailed in the first place, but I won’t go into that discussion.
What shocked me is the realization of how extremely judgmental Indonesian people are. There’s one comment that goes like this, “He shouldn’t have cried on his birthday. It’s his punishment for being a coward. He should just own up to it, like Cut Tari. Look how Cut Tari’s life is so much better now after she admitted the whole thing.”
It was beyond me how the person could be so sure about Cut Tari’s life.
I can bet that those people have never even met Ariel in person. I thought that kind of hatred can only be directed to someone whose action affected you personally. But I guess I thought wrong.
See, this is exactly what baffles me about my own fellow countrymen and women. I thought we are nice people.
Whatever happened to our hospitality? The friendly smiles of Indonesia that foreign visitors love so much, or so said the tourism brochures?
I think we’re turning into bitter and extremely self-righteous people. Or probably we have always been. How scary.
What possibly fueled so many people to be so angry about a rock star who made sex tapes? I really can’t think of any. Something must have gone wrong somewhere for a country to breed so many hypocrites. Too many people are too happy to cast the first stone.
I skipped classes too much during university therefore I can’t make an analysis from sociological or anthropological point of views. But my simplistic analysis is this: Indonesians take themselves way too seriously. Add to that our lazy ass attitude. That what breeds self-righteousness. We think we’re all that. And we’re too lazy to find out that we’re not. We never seek references.
Of course, that’s only my simplistic view on a much more serious issue. My knowledge is very limited therefore I can’t speak for the whole nation.
But that’s what I think.
I agree on death penalty. But only for pedophile, serial killers and terrorist.
We have too much hatred within us already. I wish everyone can just grab a beer and chill and laugh about life. Even if sometimes we don’t feel like laughing.
I know that I’m too insubstantial to influence anything on people. But if I were to be someone important, my one message to my fellow countrymen and women is this: Stop walking around with sticks up your asses. It's so damn annoying!
Now go and be crazy at the nearest bar. It's Friday.
Have a nice weekend all :)
