The last straw: Are camels stronger?

JAKARTA (JP): In the old days our ancestors wore wide-brimmed straw hats, sat on straw chairs, tickled their ears with straw and slept on straw mats. Today, in the age of microelectronics, who would care about the straw that mother nature used to provide in abundance? Only the birds, perhaps, for they still use straw to build their nests.

Perhaps because of its importance, writers of great literary works were quite fond of using the word "straw" in their works. Chaucer, for instance, wrote in Canon's Yeoman's Tales: "Oh, straw! You silly fool!" Shakespeare wrote in Winter's Tale: "...not life, I prize it not a straw, but for mine honor..." Or, in Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark: "Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats, will not debate this question of straw." About the only neutral use of the word has been found in the saying: "The straw that our sickles reap is far heavier than the grain."

As the human race sped into modernity and artificiality began to rule the world, the slender tube made of waxed paper or plastic conquered the original denotation of the word. Now when we hear the word, we no longer think of stalks of threshed grain, but the straw as a by-product of Coca-colonization.

Incidentally, do you have any idea how far this man-made straw has penetrated our lives? Just drop by any hospital in Jakarta. Go into the wards and you'll see that nurses have long stopped spoon-feeding their patients and now just stick a straw in the patient's mouth and tell them to suck. Less work for the nurses, less personal caring for the sick, but everyone in that institution would call it efficiency.

Now don't get me wrong. The modern straw is not all bad. I would definitely hesitate before ordering es teler unless I was sure that I had a straw to drink it with. My favorite drink, es cendol does not exactly lend itself to being sucked through a straw, but it's cleaner than drinking it from the rim of a glass. Who knows what germs are left over on those glasses in our city's food stalls, which are not famous for their hygiene.

By the way, is there any other meaning for the word straw? You bet. It's the kind of straw that we have to deal with from the moment we get up in the morning until we fall asleep at night. It's the kind of straw that is placed on our backs the moment we pick up our newspapers and read the headlines. More straw is thrown on our back as we listen to the news or gossip with our friends.

This straw gets piled up on our backs as we read or hear about all the violence, injustice, hypocrisy and corruption around us. We read about student brawls and innocent young students killed needlessly. We read about fatal accidents and huge fires occurring due to sheer carelessness. We hear officials make statements that defy common sense. We read about state funds being misappropriated and new taxes being introduced with all sorts of justification. We read about new policies that we know will create more problems, when the existing ones have yet to be solved.

Once in a while we do see silver linings. Jak Jaunt's Ode to Pak Toha in your Dec. 15 edition, for instance, recounted one of those rare moments that lifts some of the straw off our backs. But the rate at which the straw is accumulating on our backs these days makes me wonder if there ever will be a "last straw" that breaks the camel's back. Perhaps our leaders simply believe that we Indonesians have unbreakable backs.

-- Zatni Arbi