W

hen I was a little boy in a small town in Central Java, I used to play simple games with my friends - traditional Javanese games. Mostly using makeshift play tools and nuts (whole cashew nuts or snake fruit seeds) as chips.

I observed that some of my friends sometimes cheated, and there were inveterate cheaters who cheated almost all the time. They just wanted to win at any cost, and if they lost because we make sure that they didn't cheat they were such a bad losers, they just quit or even worse destroyed the tools or ran away with the *chips'. Just as by being bad losers they were bad, they were also as bad when they were the winners, they jeered at or taunted the losers. That was when I was a small boy. When I grew older, I observed some of my friends cheating in school. They got good grades but I knew that they were cheating. In university I also observed my fellow students cheating in exams. Subsequently some of them even just plagiarized others' theses just to get their degrees by the easy way.

Later in life, I observed people cheating on their business partners, evading taxes, making counterfeit goods, and doing all sorts of corrupt things. Corruption, in particular, I think is a manifestation of the mentality of bad losers and bad winners. Those who actually couldn't afford luxuries in life because of their job as civil servants, but who have the mentality of bad losers will eventually find a way to acquire wealth by any means, and they become corruptors. They even flaunt their wealth shamelessly.

A big gathering of politicians from the losing parties, big and small, declared a joint recommendation to reject the results of the 2009 legislative election together. I also read in the newspapers and watched in the television news about legislative candidates who withdrew their gifts of praying mats from a mosque, cement from a village community, barricading market stalls, and many other incidents all over the country - because they didn't get the expected results from the election despite the gifts and favors.

I was utterly disgusted with this outright shameless show of losing badly! Big and small, they are bad losers of a nation, and made us a nation of bad losers. Perhaps it is just right for the people of Indonesia for not choosing them as parliament members and later on as president. No way for such bad losers to legislate and run this country!