Polemik Keistimewaan Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta

Yogyakarta adalah sebuah magnet di Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia. Tidak hanya sebagai ikon pariwisata dan pusat kebudayaan Jawa, namun Yogyakarta juga menjadi kota yang membesarkan para pelajar dari segenap penjuru bumi pertiwi. Mereka datang karena tertarik oleh kutub keistimewaan provinsi yang tidak dimiliki oleh daerah lainnya ini. Yogyakarta adalah sebuah penjelmaan dari nilai-nilai idealis masyarakat Indonesia nan hidup bergotong-royong secara komunal serta tetap memegang tradisi luhur meski berdampingan dengan globalisasi modern.

Keistimewaan Yogyakarta itu sendiri sebenarnya tidak hanya terletak pada kelebihan-kelebihan serta potensi yang dimiliki olehnya secara sosio-filosofis semata. Presiden Soekarno selaku penjalan kekuasaan di negara ini telah memberikan Yogyakarta status ‘istimewa’. Semenjak TK hingga sekarang, yang kita lihat di atas peta Indonesia adalah Provinsi Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta. Embel-embel istimewa ini menjadi semakin menarik jika kita mengetahui asal-muasal, dampak, serta kaitannya dengan masa yang akan datang.

Amanat 5 September merupakan bukti tertulis dalam sejarah bagaimana Yogyakarta dapat mencapai status keistimewaannya. Amanat tersebut merupakan sebuah janji yang dibuat atas dasar pengorbanan rakyat Yogya dalam memperjuangkan kemerdekaan RI serta sebagai tanda penghormatan kepada Kesultanan yang telah memberikan banyak kontribusi untuk mewujudkan kemerdekaan bagi nusantara.

Status istimewa yang dimiliki Yogyakarta antara lain melingkupi hak khusus Sultan sebagai gubernur DIY serta Paku Alam sebagai wakil gubernurnya. Keistimewaan ini berbeda dengan keistimewaan yang diberikan oleh pemerintah kepada provinsi lain seperti Daerah Istimewa Aceh (Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam) maupun Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta (DKI Jakarta). Jika di Aceh dan Jakarta status istimewa lebih kepada kekhususan dalam hal peraturan maupun perwilayahan, maka di Yogyakarta tampuk pemerintahan berada langsung di bawah pengaruh keluarga Keraton Kasultanan Ngayogyakarta Hardiningrat. Tradisi pewarisan kekuasaan di Yogyakarta mengundang beragam kontroversi akan pelaksanaan sistem demokrasi di negara republik seperti Indonesia, sehingga Amanat 5 September yang tadinya mengintegrasikan daerah Kesultanan Yogyakarta berubah menjadi sebuah polemik.

Pemerintah saat ini tidak benar-benar memperhatikan mengenai gejala yang timbul dalam masyarakat internal Yogyakarta itu sendiri. Suara-suara yang menuntut disahkannya keistimewaan Yogyakarta semakin lama semakin menguat. Tulisan-tulisan dari kaum intelektualis asli Yogyakarta yang menginginkan realisasi janji pemerintah beriringan dengan aksi damai menuntut kepastian kedudukan Sultan di tengah masyarakatnya sendiri.



Badan legislasi selaku pihak yang memegang peranan penting dalam pengesahan RUU Keistimewaan Yogyakarta terkesan tidak begitu serius dalam menanggapi masalah ini. Belum ada agenda khusus untuk membicarakannya. Selain itu di DPR sendiri masih terjadi perbedaan pendapat akan keputusan yang sebaiknya diambil. Tarik-ulur yang dilakukan oleh DPR terasa amat merugikan. Rakyat Yogyakarta merasa aspirasi mereka tidak didengarkan dan Sultan pun merasa tidak dipenuhi haknya.
Penetapan gubernur di wilayah Yogyakarta bagi warganya tidak dianggap sebagai sebuah tindakan yang mengancam demokrasi bangsa. Bagi mereka itu justru merupakan bentuk perwujudan dari suara masyarakat yang ingin mempertahankan kehidupan budaya mereka melalui pemerintahan keraton yang diwarisi secara turun-temurun. Akan tetapi, pihak-pihak yang menghendaki dilakukannya pemilihan beranggapan lain. Menurut mereka, penetapan gubernur secara langsung akan melanggar konstitusi. Karena itu pemerintah seharusnya membuka peluang bagi calon selain sultan untuk maju ke pemilihan di daerah.



Kontroversi yang terus bermunculan dapat berdampak bagi kehidupan masyarakat Yogyakarta. Pemerintah daerah memegang peranan besar atas keberlangsungan birokrasi serta kemajuan lingkungannya. Apabila tidak segera dicari jalan keluar yang efektif dalam penanganan masalah keistimewaan Yogyakarta, dikhawatirkan akan timbul gerakan-gerakan ekstrim seperti ‘Yogyakarta Mardiko Wae’ yang menginginkan berpisahnya Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta dari Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia.

"UNITY"

War is still happening. For those of you who believe that war is a form of brutallity, madness and barbaric act, each one of us basically having the same line. Who doesn't want to live side by side in harmony and peace? Who, shall I ask you, in this beautiful land created by the Life-Giver intended to shed blood of his own brother? In fact, human is getting lose their purity and principal thought about living as one big family.

What happened between North and South Korea two days ago was a very lamentable moment. After years being separated in cold-hearted relationship between those two brothers, after decades of longing and seeking each others attention, and after times of fearing, the artillery's shot shook the earth which remark a new war in this generation. Both countries from the same root that've been splitted by 'an imaginary line' left the saddest stories in the history of human kind.

We've witnessed grief, pain, and suffering as the results of any military campaign or devastated missiles attack. Although there's some international restriction to protect civilian from those kind of things, the battle field will always remain of victims.

Despite of how different we are toward another, despite how politics, religion, blind-pride, and economic reason are frequently play maneuver to stike the fire, despite the nature of human to enlivened the world with riot, I still believe that someday it'll come to the day when there's no such word like 'You' or 'Me'. Instead, we'll have 'We' as term to refer the first person.

Until we can put the whole world in the same dinner table...
I'll wait and pull my string to see that new unity in the future.

"You & Me" by Zee Avi

Everytime I turn on my iTouch and hear this song, I always feel I will take the latest train to the dream world of infinity... Simply fall in love with the lyrics :)

You were sitting at the coffee table
where you're reading Kierkegaard
Minutes later, you proceeded to say
something that almost broke my heart

You said, "Darling, I am tired of livin' my routined life.
There's so much in the world that I'd like
to soak up with my eyes."
Well, baby I never did stop you from going out to explore
We can do it all together from the colds of the poles
to the tropics of Borneo

Ba da da ba da...

Let's pack our bags
and lie on the easy stream
feel the water on our backs
where we can carry on dreamin'
where we can finally
be where we'd like to be
Darlin', just you and me

Just you and me...

So Darlin', what do you say?
Does that sound like a plan to you?
We can build our own little world
where no one can come through
We can live in huts made out of grass
we can greet father time as he walks pass
we can press feet into the dirt
a little mud, no, it wouldn't hurt

Ba da da ba da ba...

Let's pack our bags
and lie on the easy stream
feel the water on our backs
where we can carry on dreamin'
where we can finally
be where we'd like to be
Darlin', just you and me

Just you and me...

Winning Essay Tips: The $500 Mistake

I copied this article from FastWeb and posted it here because I think the content is really important for us. If you want to write an essay for scholarship application or contest, be sure you are awared of this stuff. Enjoy reading ;)

By Lauren Bayne Anderson
June 23, 2009

It’s official: The deadline for the Bank of America Student Voices Essay Contest was June 22nd and our judges are in deep, editing the more than 4,000 essays we received.

There are some great entries, but we also noticed some frequent mistakes students make that can instantly disqualify you from an essay contest.

Here, an example of what NOT to do in an essay — and some tips on making yourself a better candidate for scholarship cash.

Here’s one of the essays we received for The Bank of America Student Voices Essay Contest:

“To be able to hold onto your money you have to know how to manage it. Money management is a complicated process. As teenagers we often have no idea how to manage money and we end up wasting a lot of it. But in a bad economy most of us have had a crash course in what happens when you don’t manage your money properly. We have had to delve into a world foreign and unfamiliar to us and solve our own money problems. The most successful of us have managed to still have some semblance of a social life without going over our small budgets. The keys to doing this successfully are actually quite simple.

set up your own budget of expenses. Teenagers may not have to worry about paying a mortgage or rent but we do have to be able to pay for gas, insurance for our vehicles, and the never ending list of project expenses and supplies for classes. So you have to sit down and balance what you spend in a month with what you actually make, and whether that’s the money you get for your birthday that you manage to stretch with help from mom’s pocketbook or it’s the minimum wage that you get from the local fast food joint where you have managed to find employment the money comes from somewhere and it needs to be written down.

review your expenses daily. This includes balancing your checkbook and reviewing your online statements, as well as calculating any emergency expenses that you were not considering. This needs to be fluid as sometimes things come up that you just couldn’t have forseen.

You have to get creative. You are not always going to have the time to sit there with a calculator crunching numbers so create small ways to keep thing balanced without having to. Send yourself easy phone reminders about a few of your expenses. Always bring your school id with you because a lot of places will give students discounted rates. And finally, just remember where your money is going it will help.”

So, what was wrong and what was right?


One thing the essay writer did correctly was to stay within the word count for the contest. The Bank of America Student Voices Essay Contest stated that essays should range from 250-350 words and this essay comes in at 349 words. Good job! Another positive is that the writer stayed on topic and answered the question that was presented.

However, even though the writer did stay on topic, the response took a meandering approach and didn’t take a strong or memorable stance. In short, the “meat” of the essay wasn’t there. Think of it this way: sum up in one sentence what you want the reviewer to know and remember after reading your essay. Did you get that across in a clear and concise way?

Each essay should get across at least one breakout idea (aka the thesis statement) and the rest of the essay should focus on selling that point. If it’s a new, creative or off-beat idea, focus on selling and explaining that. If it’s a common idea, focus on trying to say it better than anyone else.

Here are a few more examples of what the essay writer did wrong:

Misspellings – Misspellings are the fastest way to ensure an essay is disqualified. When combing through a stack of essays, a judge will first rule out the essays with simple misspellings. Long story short: run a spell check and have someone else you trust look over it. It’s always best to get a second set of eyes.

Incomplete sentences — Remember, each sentence should have a subject (someone or something) and a verb (action). Wondering if your sentence is complete? Here’s a hint: A complete sentence tells a complete thought.

No capitalization – it’s bad enough not to capitalize words at the beginning of a sentence, but at the beginning of a paragraph it stands out even more! Yikes!

Missing punctuation — In this example, the writer does not have proper command over the use of commas — namely they are missing in places they should have been added and added places they are not required.

Poor grammar and sentences that don’t make sense— The essay writer uses poor word choices, improper grammar and mistakes such as having too many spaces between words. Another example of poor grammar is the confusion of grammatical persons — in the beginning of the essay the writer uses the first person plural (we) and toward the end, the writer uses the second person (you).

Run-on sentences— In this essay, one sentence has 72 words. As a rule, try to keep sentences no longer than 35 words each.

Keep these tips in mind the next time you write an essay. Remember, you don’t want to give the judges any reason to disqualify your essay right off the bat.

Einstein, Descartes, Plato, Socrates, Montesquieu v. Me

Tulisan ini sudah pernah saya muat di facebook note on Wednesday, October 14, 2009



Mari bersenam otak dengan 'merespon secara dangkal' terhadap quote-quote pemikir-pemikir hebat dunia yang kedengarannya juga 'dangkal'!

Einstein pernah mengatakan; "Imajinasi jauh lebih penting ketimbang ilmu pengetahuan'. Dulu, ketika baru pertama kali mendengarnya, saya belum paham benar akan maksud dari perkataan pria keturunan Yahudi yang didaulat sebagai orang terpandai di muka bumi ini. Bagaimana mungkin 'imajinasi' yang hanya berupa angan-angan dapat menduduki peringkat lebih tinggi ketimbang ilmu pengetahuan yang jelas-jelas merupakan sumber dari hasil pemikiran manusia yang tertinggi? Apakah seorang saintis NASA yang memikirkan bagaimana cara manusia dapat dipindahkan ke planet lain tidak lebih penting dari seorang penganggur malas yang kerjanya nonton tv (dan membayangkan Angelina Jolie menjadi istrinya)?

Rene Descartes pernah mengatakan 'Je pense, donc je suis', aku berpikir maka aku ada (eksis). Dulu saya menganggap frase ini sebagai hal terkonyol yang pernah eksis di muka bumi. Haruskah saya berpikir terlebih dahulu untuk menghadirkan diri saya di muka bumi ini? Bagaimana halnya dengan orang yang tidur (sedang tidak berpikir), apakah dengan kata lain mereka sebenarnya tidak eksis dalam kehidupan (walau hanya dalam beberapa jam saja di malam hari) karena tidak berpikir?



Plato berpendapat, idealnya sebuah negara haruslah dipimpin oleh ahli-ahli filsafat. Ini juga konsep yang terdengar tidak masuk akal ketika untuk pertama kali saya membacanya. Apa yang dapat dilakukan oleh filsuf-filsuf itu? Apa yang dapat mereka lakukan untuk menjalankan kelangsungan sebuah negara? Negara membutuhkan sesosok figur yang tidak hanya pandai berfikir cepat akan tetapi Ia juga harus dapat bertindak tegas dan nyata di dalam menjalankan pemerintahan. Terus-terang, di kepala saya saat itu yang namanya ahli filsafat alias filsuf itu adalah bapak-bapak botak (atau berambut putih gondrong), berjenggot, memakai jubah kumal nan panjang serta terus-terusan tenggelam dalam diamnya alam pemikiran mereka. Ok, jadi apakah saya mengehendaki pemimpin negara yang seperti itu?

Socrates memprediksi ide-idenya sendiri dengan redaksi seperti ini; "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others." Well, on that moment sure I won't believe you, Sir. So sorry, but if you sure that kind of requirement (to question oneself and others) was the highest form of Human Excellence, then let me ask you this: 'who on earth will answer all of those questions?'. See, a philosopher like you could think about questioning something but never reveal the trully answer to the common people. And you let hundreds of unfinished problems to the people on the future, so they missinterpreted your stuff and make conclusions by their own.

Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesqieu pecaya bahwa 'pemerintah harus diatur sedemikian rupa sehingga tidak ada rakyat yang takut antara satu sama-lain'. Filosofi yang kedengarannya masuk akal dan idealis, sayangnya tidak realistis. Pada kenyataannya pemerintahan itu tak akan dapat berjalan tanpa adanya hukum yang mengatur masyarakat, dan hukum dalam applikasinya pada kehidupan sehari-hari haruslah mengikat serta memiliki sanksi yang tegas. Mengapa harus ada sanksi? Agar warga masyarakat tidak melakukan pelanggaran. Sanksi digunakan sebagai alat untuk mengontrol rasa ketakutan dan keamanan. Hukum tidak akan membiarkan kekuasaan menunggangi hukum, akan tetapi sifatnya yang imperatif (memaksa) jelas-jelas menimbulkan rasa takut dibenak masyarakat (sekalipun mereka tidak melakukan pelanggaran hukum).

Setidaknya pendapat-pendapat seperti itulah yang saya anut (dengan dangkalnya dan tidak melalui uji-baca maupun diskusi mendalam untuk berargumen skeptikal seperti di atas) dan bertentangan dengan apa yang dipercayai oleh Einstein, Descartes, Plato, Socrates, dan Montesquieu. Peace y'all!

It doesn't mean that I'm running-away

Runaway? Hell no.

Yep, it is true that now I'm back to Makassar, my beloved hometown. Mount Merapi has intensely showing his magnificent wrath toward people who live around his throne. I experienced a massive volcanic ashes rain twice, and the last one (on Friday Nov 5) was the worst. The ashes are really unhealthy, dangerously contained chemicals and very risky to be inhaled. Beside that, the safe zone was spread from 5 km to 10 km, and end up with 20 km. 20 km? are you kidding me? That's like only 10 km away from place where i'm sleeping in Yogyakarta. Having that thought, my mother called me several time and asked me to retreat, go to Bantul, Blitar, or back to Makassar. Because I know that nobody will take me to my uncle's house at Bantul amidst the 'ashes-storm' (it lasted til 3 pm), and I didn't feel like want to go to Blitar, here we go; back to Makassar via Surabaya.

I love Jogja very much, I belief so does friends who live there. But seeing Jogja now is a different story. None of student from out of this city choosed to stay, they all gone. Merapi has scared us, and even the local people mentioned this situation as 'mencekam', thrilling. That's why I deeply appreciate those volunteers who decided to keep in touch with the refugee and rescue them all, while almost all of those volunteers are only college studentds. I hope everything will turn better after Merapi lose his vexation. I've lost an opportunity to join an International Youth Conference about Climate Change (was held by Ministry of Youth and Sport), lost chance to witness Obama's speech (he'll come to Jakarta this week and I got a free ticket from YES Alumni to be one of his audience), and also can't work with my Willem C. Vis East team.


Merapi as seen from Jalan Kaliurang, Yogyakarta. You can see the super-hot clouds comes out. Courtesy: Diva Indraswari

Dear Merapi, please turn your voices lower. Please stop your aggravation. And you better provide those people whose living around you with amazing blessing of fertility. And please, make Yogyakarta as a nice place to live for us, students who came far-faraway to learn knowledge, dig the culture, and spread understanding. Have your peace sleep, Merapi...