TheJakartaPost
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Pancasila, school and social learning
Giving life to Pancasila is an active learning process. It involves the willingness to constantly revise one’s thoughts, attitudes and actions amid the diversity and changes within the social milieu. #opinion
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Pancasila illustration (JP/Budhi Button)
O
n a cool morning in a Greater Jakarta suburb, the sounds of birdsong and a clucking flock of chickens — which have their own worth — were under siege by the loudspeakers of several houses of worship.
On such a presumably pleasant morning, the benefits of loudspeakers are diminished. They become machines that usurp the people’s right to peace, especially babies, children, mothers and the tired who need some rest.
The cool air and the sounds of various animals at dawn are nature’s blessings and provide physical and spiritual relief. Loudspeakers were created to help humans.
When the two encounter each other, however, the voices of nature lose to the noise produced through a collusion of modernity and religious absurdity.
It is an “absurdity”, because I’m sure it is the result of shallow minds rather than God’s command.
The users, believing that God would be pleased and they would thus be rewarded, forgot that the air is a public space, a shared possession that cannot be used arbitrarily.
In the wake of June 1, the birthdate of Pancasila — the five principles of the state ideology comprising godliness, humanity, unity in diversity, democracy and social justice — I am reminded and convinced that the sound of loudspeakers are more symbolic of religious euphoria and egocentrism. It is neither a democratic practice nor a fearless silent consensus.
