Unpresidential words

Unpresidential words

Foreign minister Alwi Shihab may be right, that the
President's latest untempered words regarding Singapore will do
no lasting harm to Indonesia's relationship with that country.
Or The Jakarta Post may be correct in suggesting that the
President might have done irreparable harm to this special
bilateral relationship. What seems certainly harmed is the
President himself. Thanks to the President's own words, which are
increasingly inexplicable, the question inevitably will be about
his health of mind.

Has the President's judgment been impaired by his multiple
strokes? Has the burden of his blindness had an overlooked
emotional effect which has disturbed his thought processes?
Blindness is more than a physical handicap. For a man like
Abdurrahman Wahid, a life-long intellectual, reading must have
been one of the most important activities and greatest pleasures
of his days. It was that which put him in touch with history and
the universe of ideas. His knowledge and even his wisdom, two of
the things that brought him to where he is today, came largely
from reading. Blindness has deprived the President of that pillar
of his sense of personal strength.

Blindness that comes later in life requires a bigger
adjustment than does blindness from birth. Learning to walk
unassisted in public and learning to read Braille, for example,
are more difficult at 60 years of age. To speculate on a person's
emotional state publicly is in poor taste and normally out of
bounds. But this is the chief executive of the country, and given
his unusual behavior, it may be time to consider whether the
impact of the President's blindness, the frustration it must
cause him, is affecting his performance.

People can function well in executive positions even with
physical and mental handicaps (political correctness in the U.S.
prohibits even the use of that word) like blindness, paralysis,
dyslexia, or depression, if they find effective ways to
compensate for their particular limitation. What will the
President do to compensate for his physical limitations, so that
he will feel more in control and less given to counterproductive
public defiance?

DONNA K. WOODWARD

Medan, North Sumatra