Long Winding Road to Perspective Changing

Negative and positive are the most inevitable things in this life. They fill each other, like man and woman, earth and sky, land and ocean, up and down, sell and buy, angel and demon. In addition to an epitome which defines the true self, positive and negative also emerge as elements with the ability to define its opponent existence. Positive will be an entity's definition because of there is also negative standing there, and this also goes contrarily. Many philosophers had tried to untangle the real significance of both. Nevertheless, two of them are as of existence, which cannot be denied even on the righteous grounds, morally either worthiness. 

In other words, the perception over negative and positive has been forcibly planted within the mind of man by one’s family, people, and educational institution during a very young age. After a while, perception grown as memories. As a human gets older and leaves their childhood playground, he/she will take a look at anything surround their new neighborhood with certain perception from their early days. If a matter seems different from the early perception, it will be a reason to start a dialog inside their minds about why “Y” exists in the case where “X” should be in such place instead. 

Any final decision comes from the mind is a lead of way of thinking development. Education and learning goals are finally succeed, as humans make attempt to analyze any kind of differences they meet. But analyzing needs means and effort, aka analyzing is tiring and need a lot of energy. In this fast-paced age when fast food becomes family meal, any tiring things are mistakes as if it doesn’t bring any financial outcome. It’s not a breaking news to find a number of indolent people over analyzing the causes and how to negotiate with differences.  The idleness might have come from the inside that restrain will to drain its energy to respond an occurrence. In one hand, some people who disposed on analyzing differences must obey the propulsion of society of not to violate stability.

Perception shifting

Humans are devotees of stability right to the core: stable family, stable income, stable prices, stable kids .. When a dismay in life is unavoidable, they will try as hard as they can to retrieve the situation as it was before. However, there’s no such thing as immortality, even a stable-like North Magnetic Pole is drifting its original site away since last decades. It’s not a crime to yearn for stability, since it is likely impossible to live happily as a family or building the country without stability. Still and all, our existence, our families, our people, and our countries, are not the only entity to struggle to exist and to survive in the universe. As journey to reach for the stability is underway, an entity will face some either several collision against other entities who also in their attempt to fight for their own. And, such collision will always come up with negative connotation, as any of it is always uncomfortable. Such condition can’t be pushed aside, no matter how protective we are to keep our parts away from any collision and meet stability seamlessly. It is almost certain enough that an intention to avoid collusion is sort of defense mechanism after presumption that a crash is painful, without question.

Either playing safe or standing against the impact, an entity has their right to choose. There are a lot reasons to influence final decision - a mixture of socio-cultural, education, economy, idealism backgrounds, also vision and mission about the future. As an entity decide where their steps would lead to, they calculate chances of collision altogether. Along this journey they realize (and if only they are willing to admit) that everything that they have been believing for so long taught by their ancestors and old wise men, not every of them are reliable enough to be practiced in the age of constant changing.  However, we should not accuse our ancestors for created things that cannot be compatible eternally, because we and they stand and stood in our respective timelines. When our nation’s heroes fought for freedom, it’s likely they never predicted that wars will be lasting with their new names, such as trade war, proxy war, and (PC and laptop) keyboard war.  Every generations have their own hopes and dreams. Whatever our founding fathers fought for, it can still be our fight even if we choose a different strategy to win the battle, and as soon as we decide to give up the fight will be the time of our betrayal.  

We all know that our motherland is never lack of intelligent persons with brightest ideas on how to meet prosperity. But what is an intelligence for, if it doesn’t come over with a balance between its intelligence dynamism?  I am not saying that we are an intelligence-doomed nation. Human will adapt themselves with any challenges around them to survive, that’s what humans been doing since their existence as cavemen. But for some people, change is like a pain in the ass as it violates stability, even when they are aware that change happens for greater good. Such anxiety might arose when they foresee change as a big, massive, chaotic, and viral phenomenon. As a matter of fact, we can start change with one single step and hectic is unnecessary. Here’s how we do it: change our viewpoint, our perspective.

Lesson from Far Away Land  

Several weeks earlier, an ex-government official expressed his disappointment through a writing on a local newspaper, criticized Indonesian government for not took over a gold opportunity. He wrote about Saudi Arabia’s attempt to build new oil axis, as the country leads escalating partnerships with China, India, and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia with its oil company, Saudi Aramco, has taken a potential crude oil source in Tuban, East Java, on its radar. Instead of answered Saudi Aramco’s offer positively, Indonesian government (Pertamina) turned its back away and started a partnership with Russian Rosneft to explore the region. “What’s the drama behind this?” he wrote. No drama, just data. Pertamina has decided to choose Rosneft as a partner, because the company offered exclusive data to hasten Tuban Grass Root Refinery (GRR) project development. Rosneft also offered exclusive rights to cooperate in Russian upstream oil sector. 

Similar to Pertamina, Rosneft is a state enterprise. The company was established in 1933 as the heir of  Soviet Union’s Ministry of Oil and Gas, several years after the country’s collapse in early 90’s. Today, Rosneft is in the 24^th of world top oil companies. The company gains such achievement after its struggle through challenges and setbacks, including financial difficulty during 1998 Russian economic crisis. The crisis was a result of two external onsets, the oil price decline and South East Asian economy crisis (which also happened in Indonesia) during 1997. History has told us about free market economy consequences. A country is free in terms of start to trade with any country, but it is not free from economic distress in some other countries. Russian Federation Government and the Central Bank announced a solution as trying to stabilize national economy. On August 17^th, 1998, they decided to enforce technical default on government securities and devaluated rubel exchange rate several times. The immediate impact of this decision was a lowering foreign community and investors trust for Russian banks and government. Several small size companies and banks soon announced their bankruptcy. Bankrupt banks customers lost all of their savings, while others must faced painful effect that their savings had fallen off, living standards deteriorated, and unemployment soared. Many seen this decision was hard and inefficient, but the gloomy days did not last forever, eventually.

Currency rate is almost having no value in the international market as soon as devaluation policy becomes effective. But in the same time, local products or export commodities will be cheaper for importer countries. This impact may boost buyers’ demands, and the types of export commodities are varied which provides more options for foreign customers to choose. This was applied in Russia and resulted positive impact, as export volume increased and piled up foreign funds reserve inside the country. In 1999, Russian Federation budget deficit was 2.5% of GDP, better than in 1998 when the deficit was 4.7% of GDP. Proposed for a bail out or loan to cover state deficit was considered as less efficacious to prevent inflation and might led to economy instability instead. So, how did they handle such lack of state budget situation? An effective measured undertaken by Russian government was to rectify investors’ interest to invest in real sector of the economy to contribute to production growth.

And how about ideology? There are hardly any countries succeed in transforming their old ideology to a new one. We all know what Soviet Union once had. In fact, its successor generations are cautious over communism dark side. They decided to change state’s ideology for the better, mainly for the sake of its citizens well-being. Democracy is Russia Federation ideology, and there is a strong urge to evade bitter memories from happening once again. We have witnessed how US and its allies are haunted by communism. The horror has created a “unique” relationship between US and Russia, despite the fact that hammer and sickle no longer grow in Red Bear country. And such horror might be a result of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, sort of mental disorder that can develop after experiencing or witnessing a terrifying effect.  

In conclusion, something is not always exactly the same with how it seems. It is a challenge that turns the life becomes more interesting to live, as the beauty of life is a unification between positive, negative, and everything in between both of them. Negative and positive are walking side by side, aren’t they? Even all land on Earth will extinct bit by bit as humans population higher, the world is still a tremendous space for new ideas and new perspectives. There are uncountable opportunities and achievements await if we don’t hold ourselves back from opening the door and start a sweet relationship with other countries. We would never be going anywhere if we keep pushing our version becomes the single operation procedure of a partnership. Something is called as a partnership when there are two sides explicating their own ideas and goals, opening each of themselves up later on to search for potentials and working hard to incarnate their visions. Together is better than alone, don’t you think so? (swastantika).