The importance of forming nation character

Some time ago, Rahadi T Wiratama as reported by NU Online news portal said that the weaknesses of the nation in all aspects were caused by the absence of strong national character and commitment. The absence has ironically been conducted by elites of the New Order, well know as the Generation 66 (Angkatan 66). Formerly, it’s clear that the national character building was part of the effort to conduct the nation’s building.

In 1960s as such a consequence of the Proclamation, all society elements conducted the forming of nation building through scholarly forums, schools, Islamic boarding “Pesantren” schools, religious gatherings, and so on. Even drama, vocal art, plastic art, and letters were significantly used to build the nation’s character, so RI became a nation respected by international community. Its figures and people were appreciated by other nations for its character and much more prominent works.<>

Since the New Order era, the nation has been in degradation. Formerly, the character building had been realized but not for the New Order conducting what called as the character assassination by accusing that the figures living in the era were considered as the Old Order men whose nationalistic, chauvinist, rigid, and dogmatic thinking. The figures were accused of being left, anti-development, traditional, and so on.

The idea of Nationalism or nationhood has slowly been vanished by firstly introducing new nationalism, based not on ethnic and geographic ties. On the contrary, the nationalism has slowly been delegitimated for being considered as the form of both chauvinism and fanaticism. More over since the issue of globalization in 1990s, the nationalism has been viewed as not being relevant and even out of date.  

In this case, the nation has experienced two phases, namely character assassination and nation assassination. In turn, many people have no such courage to speak about nationalism and even tend to look down it as the awareness and the spirit of nationalism have been killed. The actors of the assassination are modern intellectuals, officials, professionals, activists of pro-democracy as the successors of global imperialism.

When the character is regarded not important, the human life would become pragmatic so there would be no the sense of both devotion and struggle. Whereas, to set up such a move further more within the national scale, it is again in need of the devotion and struggle. Without these, all people would not find the sense of devotion and would tend to compete to pursue personal interest. The unity would disappear. The scene has made the big nation becomes small for its all assets exploited by people and government.

Due to the absence of the sense of devotion, the commitment to the nation and state would again disappear. We can see that many have now competed to exploit the nation’s capital through corruption and settling high and mounting salary. When the spirit of nationalism is killed, all foreign businessmen are pleased to come in and engage in farming so this condition would potentially replace all indigenous people economic sectors. They would lost their job fields while the government and its officials tend to uphold the foreign capitalists’ interests. They would increasingly remain in poverty, crimes would increase and social conflict would heat up. In turn, the scene would make social integration faded.

How do we uphold the dignity and prosperity of the nation? The first thing that should be taken is by rebuilding people personality through what we called as character building to awake them from colonized mental to independent one. It’s also important to the nation building to make it powerful and respected, so there is one nation of the world exploiting and colonizing the beloved country of ours.

It’s understandable that the agenda needs accurate preparedness and patience for spending long time absolutely. The most important thing is that we need to be patient in the face of critics voiced by opportunists and cynical pragmatists. Those having no concern to people and nation character building would likely look down the agenda. But this is a strategic measure that should be taken in rebuilding RI to be an independent, sovereign, respected, and prosperous nation.

The forming of character or identity is basically the seeding of both moral and motivation. All this constitutes a duty and responsibility of religions. That’s why, it’s not so strange that since the beginning of preparing the nation’s independence, religious institutions especially pesantrens have actively conducted such the nation’s character building. In this respect, the NU and pesantrens has never stop participating in forming the character and identity of the nation for considering all this is a religious prophetic duty. (Abdul Mun’im DZ)