you know what to do

uhm, chill, it's not a part of my English assignment :) . It's just a side effect of my illness which forces me to just take some rest the whole week. Caught a fever last Sunday, didn't go to college on Monday, getting worse and finally decided to get a blood test on Tuesday and the result showed that I'm infected by s. paratyphi. And the days of just-lying-down-on-my-bed are boooring -.- .


Okay back to the topic. I was sitting on the family room when this thought suddenly came to my mind. Have you ever heard one said this to you “what you said/did to someone remains forever in his/her heart” ? or this “when you tell a girl she’s beautiful, she will forget it in a couple days. When you tell her she’s ugly, she will remember it forever” ?

Honestly, I think the point is not what people say about you, because no matter how good you are, some people are going to say bad things about you. It’s inevitable. You can’t control what they’re going to say about you. You will waste your life thinking about it every time you’re going to do something.

What’s under your “control area” is how your heart react to that. In other word, actually, what’s under your “control area” is yourself.
Be more flexible. It’s not easy. You know a process to something good is never easy. By every occurrence happened to you, you are shaped. You learn to decide what’s good to be kept in your heart and what’s better be discarded.

Only then you can finally realize that your life doesn’t depend on what others say about you. Only then you can do whatever you want, with every responsibility, wisdom and conscience you have, without having to think much about what will people say.

You have choices. You always have choices. And it’s obviously clear that your feelings depend on what you choose, what you want your heart to feel.

So, what are you afraid to? Go, do something you always want to do. Chase everything you want to get. When facing people’s reactions, you know what to do ;)

This is what I can say about students brawls..

No, I’m not going to just judge them because everyone has done that. What I want to convey is that we, these-persons-people-say-as educated people, have to see this problem from every aspect of it, because I think judgment is not very beneficial.

Let’s see this first by their reason to do that. According to an article in The Jakarta Post newspaper  I’ve just read, some students said that it’s more about pride than rivalry. They want to show others that they come from this particular school, they want to be known, they want they school to be distinguished and feared by others. Some students even didn’t know the persons they attacked. Moreover, some rivalry-caused-brawls only include several students, not almost the whole students of the school.

The second is to see this as a problem only happened in Indonesia is quite wrong I think. I’ve googled some student brawls around Asia and found one happened in Bangkok and occurred in a bus, which even killed an innocent  passenger. I also found some in Malaysia, Philippines and others. So, since it has become more than a national problem, I think at least each country’s representatives can discuss it together in order to find a better solution.

The third is how we can solve or at least decrease this problem. I’m not an psychologist, I’m just a freshly-high-school-graduate so maybe you can’t compare my ‘solution’ to what the psychologists say. So here is what I can say. We need to create a better environment for each students. By ‘we’ I mean not just the school, but also their parents, religious scope, even the country and the students themselves. How they can cooperate with each other? Trust the students, love them. Some parents are too afraid of what their children can do so they can’t trust their children without realizing that trust is one of the most important thing the teenager need to achieve. By not being trusted by the society, the students feel the urge to prove something, sometimes, pitifully by violating others.

We also have to admit that media has a huge role to this, especially social media. That’s why everyone has to be equipped by an awareness of how dangerous media is, if they can’t utilize it wisely. It’s need to be concerned at because nowadays media affects people negatively more than positively.

The last thing is use the law. Some students brawls happened because the students thought there won’t be any serious punishment since Indonesian law enforcements are easily bribed. The country has to prove its integrity towards its people or everything will get worse as the time goes by.

Okay I promise it will really be the last, but I found an interesting opinion on Indonesian students by Pandji Pragiwaksono (http://pandji.com/gimana-tuh-jawaban-saya-keren-ga/) . It is written in Indonesian so I’ll do my best to translate a snippet of it.

“for every 300 students brawling on the street, there are 30.000 students who are studying, exploring their competencies, thinking and creating something. The media has never met them because the students are in their schools environment. It  barely puts them on the headlines because a news about those studying students are not eye catching enough compared to the news about the brawling students. Every time I met people who said the quality of Indonesian students is getting worse, I’m sure they have to change what they read and watch.”

a summary and response of the article titled "Wii sales may recover, but kids will still be fat"

made as an academic writing class assignment.

summary:

the falling sales of Nintendo’s Wii console reminded this article’s author about how big people enthusiasms on this invention and how it was expected to revamp the era of consoles when it was first released back then. the author reckoned on the Nintendo’s plan to launch the new version of Wii that it won’t make kids more energetic than ever. the author then presented some studies that showed us how a new technology can possibly against its initial purpose in the end. for example, the invention of Automatic Braking System on cars’ wheels and the Wii orchestrated exercise.

response:

what i can conclude from this article is that in the end, no matter how sophisticated a technology will be, it is the human’s sense that will determine what will be happened to them later. let’s think about it: they’re given a technology to facilitate themselves but if they don’t have any awareness and discretion about it, the technology will soon hit them back.

on the Wii case, it is clear that kids’ willpower and not the development of Wii that will make them exercise more. if they themselves don’t have any urge to exercise, what can the Wii or other technologies do?

a better way to make kids exercise is by instilling the awareness of a healthy lifestyle and keep encouraging them to do some outside activities because a videogame can never replace the benefits of doing the real exercise. parents have to be a good example for their children too, by not focusing on technologies too much and accompanying their children to interact with the real world outside.

the second point I got from this article is: bring the enthusiasm out for a new beneficial thing is easy; maintain the intensity of the enthusiasms for a long period is another matter.

P.s.:

I’ve Googled some articles about the study published in the journal Pediatrics which is mentioned on this article given to me (and found out that it’s published by Tom Baranowski, a psychologist) and those articles consider almost the same thing about it. You can find it on http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/business/active-video-games-dont-make-youths-more-active.html?_r=1 or http://www.center4research.org/2012/03/can-children-get-exercise-through-video-games-%E2%80%9Cexergaming%E2%80%9D/ .