Our Declaration to War and Terrorism: We Are Not Afraid

After 4 years of peacefulness, Jakarta was recently attacked (again) by a couple of bombings at two international hotels, Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott. 9 people were killed, including foreigners, and 52 were injured. It happened on a black Friday, June 17, 2009. We were supposed to have a match between Manchester United and Indonesian All Stars on yesterday. MU were going to stay at Ritz-Carlton while Indonesian All Stars already stayed at JW Marriott last Friday. The match was cancelled because of the tragedy. Indonesia is now mourning again.

 

I think the bombing itself was an opportunity for Indonesians to declare the real war against terrorists. On Friday, we started a movement on Twitter, called #indonesiaunite. We wanted the bombing attacks to become the beginning of a movement for us to unite as one nation and country again. The starter of the movement doesn’t want to be named, but #indonesiaunite became #1 on Twitter’s trending topics (we beat Paula Abdul, Harry Potter and MJ!) – which means it is one thing that most people talked about (or declared) on Twitter. Accompanied by a song called “Kami Tidak Takut” (“We Are Not Afraid”) sung by Pandji Pragiwaksono, Indonesians declared our unity in diversity (again), one month before the country’s 64th Independence Day.

 

This grassroot movement became something big. Pandji has recently interviewed by a lot of TV and radio stations to become the ambassador of this movement, people started to wear #indonesiaunite’s merchandise, we spread a lot of good news about Indonesia on Twitter, Facebook, and #indonesiaunite’s website. Finally, another phase of nationalism era was born again. We have proved that we are not afraid. We raised our flags again, we put red-and-white pictures as our Twitter avatars. Fellow celebrities including Joel Madden, Pete Wentz, and Michelle Branch ‘tweeted’ the world that they are not afraid to come to Indonesia, despite the travel warning declared by a couple of countries. Ricky Sans from Melee even put Indonesia’s flag on his Twitter avatar! We did not think that they would even see our movement.

 

All I want to say on this blog entry is that, small things really lead to something BIG. I hope my fellow Global Changemakers won’t be afraid to start small things for your CAP. Something that you can do from your homes and not costing you at all. All of us know that a lot of wars and disasters are happening right now. I believe that we can stop it together – because we are Global Changemakers. We know that Joud and Lubna are trying to establish a ‘conflict resolution’ through one fun thing: Jamming For Peace! And us Indonesian Twitter users who thought that something like Twitter is wasting our time actually did something very passionate and big by using the same (free) platform.

 

Don’t just tell people that we can change the world, or we have to be the change we want to see in the world. Show them that we are changing the world!