TheJakartaPost
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We're all in this together
This type of politics is about people: people, all people, have the potential to act like this — to kambing-hitamkan (scapegoating) as I learned in a recent Indonesian language lesson.
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A flower message by Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama's supporters after the North Jakarta District Court finds the governor guilty of blasphemy and sentences him to two years in jail on Tuesday. (JP/Seto Wardhana.)
H
ere’s a problem to contemplate — as if we don’t have enough. I’ve noticed, lately, that I, and too many people around me, despise the new global populism so much that we’re sometimes, in our frustration, doing what we claim to be against — stereotyping and generalizing entire cultures or countries.
These days, United States President Donald Trump comes on TV and I find myself muttering darkly about Americans. “Only in America,” I say to myself. Only a country with a fundamental lack of historical awareness would do this.
Only a country where evangelicals’ mortgaging of all moral sense to a handful of social issues would do this. Those yokels in Florida and Ohio have done it again, I mutter to myself.
But then there’s Brexit. So I find myself saying: but those Brits are just abysmal. Resentful shopkeepers in the Midlands: those people (“those people”?) are shameless. Small-minded, chauvinistic, in a nasty, destructive denial about their national decline, I say to myself.
