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