CATCH ME, IF YOU CAN

At Monday September 10th 2007, the regional representative council of Jakarta declared a new regional regulation number 8 about Public orderliness which regulates people in giving donation to the poor in the public sites. This new regulation consists of 74 points, more than previous regulation number 11 in 1988 which only consists of 34 points. Regional government said that they are going to socialize this new regulation until 6 months since it was declared.
This new regulation has been causing a controversy between the proponents of the regulation and the opponents of it. Both the proponents and the opponents have their own reason where they stand for. On one hand, the proponents considered that the new regulation will solve the problem of street people up to its roots because the regulation doesn’t only punish the poor as an object of donation, but also punish the driver of vehicles as a subject of donation, and on the other hand the opponents said that the government can’t forbid people from giving their donation. For this reason, the proponents said that they can give their donation through any caritative foundations.
If you ask me: which one will you stand for? For this problem, I oppose the new regulation. Why? First, because the regulation makes the problem wider and more complicated than before and it will make certain difficulties in excuting it. Second, because the regulation will never solve the real problem behind it, that is, poverty. It only touch the surface of the problem which is actually very complicated and related to the others. Based on it, this problem needs cooperation among many people and sides. Poverty can never be solved only by a regulation because it involves a basic problem which happened on many places in this country. Have the government asked the poor like street children: what do you want? Never. I think the government concludes many things based on its own thinking, so that every decision or regulation doesn’t solve the problem around it. In Karl Marx’s language: actually it is a exploitative relation between bourgeois class and proletarian class.
Finally, I think the new regulation isn’t appropriate to solve the real problem. It only makes the poor suffer more in their life. If the government doesn’t want their presence in the public sites, the government must look for what the real problem behind it is, and later make a decision which can solve the problem.