What Kind of Country That We Are Living?

Sometimes I look at Indonesia and genuinely wonder: what kind of country are we living in? Everything seems chaotic, disorganized, and unnecessarily complicated. Problems appear everywhere, yet the solutions often feel slow, unclear, or completely disconnected from what ordinary people actually need. It is as if confusion has become so normal that we are simply expected to accept it.

There are rules, but they do not always seem to be applied fairly. There are institutions meant to serve the public, but dealing with them can feel exhausting. Decisions that affect millions of people are sometimes communicated poorly, while those in power appear busy protecting their positions instead of solving the problems in front of them. Common sense feels increasingly rare, and things that should be simple somehow become difficult.

What makes it even stranger is how people have learned to laugh about the chaos. We turn frustration into jokes, memes, and sarcastic comments because sometimes that is the only way to stay sane. Something absurd happens, everyone complains for a while, and then another ridiculous problem arrives to replace it. The cycle continues until disorder no longer feels shocking—it just becomes another ordinary part of life.

Then I saw a post sharing a headline that said teachers should eat the MBG meals too in order to prevent students from being poisoned. I honestly did not know whether to laugh, get angry, or just stare at it in disbelief. Children allegedly get sick after eating the food, and the response presented to the public is not stronger food-safety controls, better supervision, or clearer accountability—but to have teachers eat it as well. How exactly does adding another potential victim prevent poisoning?

Teachers are educators, not food testers. Asking them to taste the meals does not automatically make the food safe, and it certainly does not address whatever may have gone wrong during preparation, storage, transportation, or distribution. If there is a genuine safety concern, the answer should be prevention before the food reaches anyone: proper standards, inspections, traceability, and consequences when those standards are ignored. Turning teachers—especially underpaid honorary teachers—into an informal early-warning system feels less like a solution and more like shifting responsibility onto people who already carry enough burdens.

This is the kind of absurdity that perfectly captures the frustration. A serious problem appears, but instead of fixing its root cause, someone offers an idea that merely spreads the risk. It is funny in the darkest possible way, which is probably why people react with laughter and memes. But beneath the joke is an uncomfortable question: have we become so accustomed to poorly designed solutions that basic common sense now feels revolutionary?

As if the previous story were not absurd enough, I then saw another post claiming that President Prabowo wanted elementary, junior-high, and senior-high textbooks reprinted after personally examining books brought home by his aides. According to the post, he noticed that the materials were not durable and that the text was so small that children had to read from an uncomfortably close distance. He reportedly wanted Indonesian textbooks compared with those from neighboring countries, with larger letters, stronger materials, and more attractive designs.

To be fair, none of those goals sounds unreasonable. Children deserve textbooks that are readable, durable, and well designed. The absurd part is that problems this basic apparently need to reach the president before they receive serious attention. Why does the highest office in the country have to notice the font size and paper quality? Where were the ministry, curriculum teams, publishers, quality-control systems, teachers’ feedback, and years of evaluation before the books reached millions of students?

A functioning education system should not depend on one powerful person looking at a book and suddenly discovering obvious design problems. It should have clear standards, independent reviews, accessibility testing, classroom trials, transparent procurement, and regular feedback from the students and teachers who actually use the materials. If a presidential observation is required to trigger all of that, then the real problem is much larger than small letters or fragile paper. It suggests that the institutions beneath the president are not doing—or are not being trusted to do—their most basic work.

And now the proposed answer is to reprint the books. That sounds simple until we remember the scale, cost, procurement process, environmental waste, and opportunities for yet another chaotic implementation. Better textbooks would be welcome, but replacing millions of them without a transparent, expert-led review could easily turn a sensible concern into another expensive national project. Once again, the idea itself is not necessarily wrong; it is the strange way the system seems to arrive at it that makes the whole situation feel so deeply unserious.

Last but not least, I came across another news story in which a public figure accused an alcoholic-drink brand called Newport of running a promotion that allegedly exchanged memorized Qur’anic verses for alcohol. If that description is accurate, then the concept is unbelievably stupid and insensitive. Using a sacred text as a promotional mechanic would already be inappropriate; connecting it directly to alcohol in a Muslim-majority country makes the lack of judgment even more astonishing. Who approved an idea like that, and did nobody stop for five seconds to consider how obviously offensive it could be?

Religion is not a marketing prop, and people’s beliefs should not be treated as material for a cheap gimmick. A campaign should not need a public backlash before its creators realize that combining worship, memorization, and an alcohol reward is a terrible idea. If this promotion really happened as described, the brand owes the public a clear explanation, an apology, and an account of how such a concept passed through its internal review process.

At the same time, the news report itself contains an allegation, not complete proof of what happened. That creates a second layer of absurdity: in Indonesia, accusations—especially those involving religion—can spread faster than context or verification. People immediately demand apologies, invoke blasphemy, and pass judgment based on a cropped post, while the original material, terms of the promotion, and the brand’s explanation may not yet be available. A reckless campaign would deserve criticism, but a serious accusation also deserves evidence.

That is what makes the whole situation feel so exhausting. Either a company approved one of the most tone-deaf promotions imaginable, or social media transformed an unclear incident into instant moral outrage before anyone established the facts. Possibly both. Once again, there seems to be no calm process, no careful verification, and no basic common sense—only a race between stupidity and outrage to see which one can spread faster.

Indonesia is a beautiful country with enormous potential, rich cultures, abundant resources, and people who are creative, resilient, and hardworking. That is exactly why the situation can feel so painful. We know this country could be much better, yet we keep watching the same patterns repeat themselves. The gap between what Indonesia could become and what it currently feels like is deeply frustrating. The country has everything it needs to move forward, but somehow we continue getting trapped in confusion, weak coordination, short-term thinking, and decisions that seem detached from reality.

These stories may appear unrelated—a school-meal safety problem, the president personally reviewing the physical quality of textbooks, and a controversy involving religion and alcohol—but together they reveal something deeper. Too many problems are handled through improvisation instead of reliable systems. Responsibilities are passed around, obvious risks are noticed too late, and public outrage often replaces careful investigation. Instead of preventing problems, we wait until they become scandals. Instead of trusting strong institutions, we wait for someone powerful to intervene. Instead of demanding evidence and accountability, we often settle for noise.

Perhaps that is why living here can feel so mentally exhausting. It is not only the existence of problems; every country has problems. It is the feeling that lessons are rarely learned and that the same kind of disorder keeps returning in a different form. Today it is food, tomorrow it is education, and the next day it is another controversy designed perfectly for social media. We laugh because the alternative is anger. We make memes because a joke is easier to carry than disappointment. But behind every laugh is the quiet awareness that none of this should feel normal.

Maybe the real question is not only, “What kind of country are we living in?” but also, “What kind of country are we willing to keep accepting?” Loving Indonesia does not mean defending every foolish decision or pretending that everything will somehow fix itself. Real love should leave room for criticism, disappointment, and the courage to demand something better. Hope is important, but hope without accountability becomes passivity. Patience is valuable, but endless patience can become permission for the same failures to continue.

I still want to believe that this country can improve. I want to believe that institutions can become more competent, leaders can listen without waiting for a crisis, and citizens can care about facts as much as they care about outrage. I want Indonesia’s potential to become more than a phrase repeated whenever reality becomes too disappointing. But belief becomes difficult when absurdity arrives so frequently that it starts to feel like the country’s default operating system.

So I am left somewhere between hope and exhaustion, still caring enough to be angry but too confused to know what comes next. We keep moving, but movement is not the same as progress. We keep announcing solutions, but announcements are not the same as results. We keep saying that the future will be better, while the present continues to ask us for more patience.

Where is this country heading? I honestly do not know.