Grass is Not Always Greener

A friend of my mom wrote, that she lived in Guangzhou, and she couldn’t join Facebook. Coz, Facebook had been already banned there.

I don’t know exactly what the banning is about, but I contemplate that I’ve never seen any Facebookers from China. More accurately, that ever since Friendster was still booming, I never saw any users from China. Doesn’t Chinese love social networks?

Then last week, I read that Google seem was gonna stop their site’s operation in China, since Chinese government has let its hackers hacking the Gmail accounts of Chinese citizens. Correlating to the lack of social network at China above, I can understand why Chinese never seems wandering around in Facebook. How can they have any Facebook account comfortably if someone hacks their e-mail account? What’s being good of having an e-mail account if someone can split it up? I never allow my parents opening my e-mail, how can I let anyone called “government” read my private mails?

Cartoon by David Horsey, picture by http://seattlepi.com

This issue has been so last-year, I’m not competent enough to read about emasculating of this kinda sophisticated technology. But an e-mail woke me up this morning and astonished me.

I wrote about the conflict between my country and Malaysia a few months ago in my old blog. It’s been so long and I almost forgot that I wrote it. But this morning a Malaysian from Ipoh sent me his comment and I got an interesting point from his reaction.

It’s true, Malaysia’s government has stolen Ambalat Block from Indonesia and claimed it, but it’s never been exposed in Malaysian mass media coz Malaysia’s press is demanded not to write about things which insults its governance. In fact, there are a lotta issues in Malaysia which mustn’t be written by its own media, such as for example a Mongolian girl named Altantuya Shariibuu which murdered cruelly coz she’s became a Malaysian high officer’s concubine, and also the mystery about sodomy to Anwar Ibrahim. Their government’s been hiding it for so long, made people knew nothing about it. Malaysian citizen don’t seem to know that their access to know information about their country’s politic crisis have been limited.

Cartoon from http://sloone.files.wordpress.com

Both of those countries make me feel pity coz citizens’ human right to express their opinion seem locked tight there. I thank that I was born as a citizen of Indonesia, where I don’t need to hide to have any Gmail account and I’m allowed to notice that sometimes government can make mistake. It’s true that there’s a few ulcers in some spots, such as there’s still banning on a few books which seem abusing government, but at least there’s no banning on vocal newspapers or tapping to e-mail accounts.

China may rise with its rocket which has flown to outer space. Malaysia may be rich coz they can buy oil in any prices that they want to. But if to be like them then citizen mustn’t express their critical polite opinion comfortably, I think those welfare and those greatness doesn’t mean a thing.

Indonesian says, “rumput tetangga selalu lebih hijau”, neighbour’s grass is always greener. It means, other people always own better stuffs. But what a heck if the grass is green but the root is rotten. Trust me, the grass is not always greener over there.