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The elusive day of freedom
For the government, this Independence Day should be the perfect occasion for it to renew its pledge to guarantee the health, safety and welfare of every citizen.
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Children celebrate an early Independence Day with new books and stationery in Rusun Bidara Cina, a poor neighborhood in East Jakarta, on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2020. (Courtesy of/Dapur Umum Rusun Bidara Cina)
E
arly in August, just as Indonesia was preparing to celebrate its 76th anniversary of independence, the country reached a grim milestone; 100,000 people losing their lives to COVID-19, more than a year and a half after the pandemic began in early 2020.
Such a milestone is surely one for in the history books as only rarely in the country’s modern history has there been such a massive loss of life in so short a time. The current pandemic will certainly be remembered in the future alongside major events like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 1965 communist purge and the war for independence itself.
And more than just numbers, these people, who have fallen through the cracks of the march toward the future, were somebody’s mothers, fathers, brothers, friends and acquaintances.
And this Independence Day, more than any other moment this year, is the most fitting moment for all of us to pay homage to those who have succumbed to the vicious plague.
For the government, this Independence Day should be the perfect occasion for it to renew its pledge to guarantee the health, safety and welfare of every citizen and make sure that the COVID-19 death count stops at 100,000.
When the founding fathers declared Indonesia’s independence 76 years ago, the primary pledge that they made was not simply to free the nation from the yoke of colonialism, which although undoubtedly a complicated task, turned out to be the easy part.
The hardest work to accomplish was to create prosperity for each and every Indonesian as mandated in the Preamble to the 1945 Constitution.
Founding fathers like Sukarno, Hatta and Sjahrir, felt that the task would be immensely difficult and given their ideological background, they decided that it was only the government which could make good on the promise of bringing prosperity to the many.
That conviction is enshrined in Article 33 of the Constitution, which guarantees the state control over the key means of production as a conduit to creating wealth for the benefit of all.
Such a constitutional guarantee has certainly prepared the nation for a great crisis like the one we’re facing today.
As the private sector grinds to a halt, it is the government which has had to pick up the slack, paying workers who were furloughed, distributing social aid to the poor, giving loans to small businesses and in general increasing spending to keep the economy running.
The government must also ensure that those who are ill with COVID-19 are properly cared for and their families are protected from the virus. As for the healthy population, the government owes them the guarantee of safety in the form of vaccines.
The state must ensure that we are all free from COVID-19. We will never be free until everyone is free from COVID-19.
