Catchphrases as life vests in a storm

Catchphrases as life vests in a storm

JAKARTA (JP): The last few months have been the time to
brandish those tired cliches your mother uttered when your little
world seemed to be crumbling around you.

Every cloud has a silver lining. No pain, no gain. What does
not kill you, makes you stronger. We learn from our mistakes.

Trouble is, this time it is not about flunking a geometry pop
quiz or being the last pick for the soccer team, but a horrible
hand dealt in that big, scary, uncertain crapshoot of life.

For many of us, the dreams are unraveling in fast-forward.

We know the sobering stories. Friends, or friends of friends,
who suddenly find themselves with nothing to their name but a
pink slip and a mound of debts. People robbed or assaulted by the
desperate or, sometimes, those opportunists using the crisis as a
vicious excuse to victimize others.

A foreign TV reporter, the one who undercuts her somber
delivery with a uniform of plunging necklines, termed the
situation "surreal", an adjective I usually associate with
blurred images of melted watches or animal carcasses framed
against parched desert backgrounds.

For once, she was right on the nail. Who would have imagined
just seven months ago that all our confident assumptions would be
dashed as we quaked in our shoes, literally and figuratively
losing our grip and seemingly powerless to put the brakes on the
slide?

It is all the more staggering because it happened so fast.

In December, I wrote in this column about the rupiah "dallying
dangerously" with the then unheard of 5,000 mark. A month later,
I spent a fitful night wondering if the end was nigh as the
currency slammed past 10,000.

Now, barely six weeks later, the rupiah continues to dilly and
dally; sad stories of layoffs grow and prices are numbingly high.
Through it all, most of us are soldiering on despite the daily
assault of almost universally gloomy news.

Which is not to say we have a better handle on the conundrum
of this meltdown. I, for one, do not pretend to, because all the
theories and finger-pointing often leave me searching for more
answers.

Now, however, we have a vicarious life vest to cling onto as
we are tossed back and forth in this terrible storm. That
convenient term 'krisis moneter' (monetary crisis) doubles as a
convenient, blanket catchphrase to account for the dumbfounding
realities which leave us scratching our heads.

They are the magic words when the office boy, Mesran, dims the
lights at the end of the workday, or when the accommodating
waiter sheepishly tries to justify a 30 percent increase in the
price of a cup of coffee.

And I mutter it under my breath as I reel, punch drunk from
the shock, at the Rp 28,000 price of a can of imported beans, Rp
5,000 only five months ago.

Hard-liners may sniff that this is a brazenly simplistic take
on the problem, but this is precisely why applying the terms
works in neatly encapsulating all that we are at a loss to
explain rationally.

There is a danger, too. Relying on snappy catchphrases shuts
us off from the realities of ugly situations as efficiently as
packing them away in the attic trunk. In the short term, in
buffeting ourselves from seemingly unbearable truths, they help
us plug on with life.

Once the storm has passed, as it inevitably will, they should
be discarded, except as nostalgic reminders of the battle fought
and won. For this crisis, like any trauma, needs the closure
which comes from confronting the whys and wherefores of what
caused it, however painful that soul-searching may be.

The payoff is that we will be armed to weather any future
storms that life may bring our way.

-- Bruce Emond