Cultural Heritage

"Youth these days don't seem to care about what's happening at the moment with their culture, which is a bit worrying due to the safety of their country's cultural heritage."


"All they care about is their own self. Maybe this is the effect of modern technology, who knows?"

While i was sipping my ice chocolate in Starbucks yesterday, i overheard a conversation between 2 middle-aged women, sitting right next to me.

I remain calm and decided to continue to listen to their conversation which was pretty amusing because i always enjoy listening to others' opinion.

Long story short, the two women blamed us teenagers for the lack of interest and attention about Indonesian cultural heritage.

As a youth, i gladly disagree with the statement above. I am a proud Indonesian, and i don't think me and the other (well, in my school) youngsters don't care about our culture. We definitely appreciate them and cherish them in our lives.

I admit that very few teenagers still care about our culture. Especially with the improvement of modern technology, some may choose to spend their time with their ipods, rather than playing traditional games like "Lompat Tali"or "Galasin". To be honest, I still play "Galasin" with my friends, which is a little bit unmature for my age, but i think that's okay. Because technically we're saving the Indonesian heritage.

Our cultural heritage has ethnic, beautiful, valuable, sacred, and creative written all over it. And of course us youths are very proud about it too. Maybe, society doesn't seem to understand the way that us teenagers, appreciate them and cherish them. Because there are lots of different ways to show that you truly care about it. Lots of teenagers in Jakarta go to traditional dance classes like Tari Pendet and mostly, Tari Saman. And some also take part in a youth organization called 'Indonesian Youth Conference',etc. And at school, we wear batik every friday, which shows our love for Indonesian's cultural heritage.

We also talk about things concerning our country at school, even though not as often as we talk about other stuffs. But we still do, and that shows our interest at this thing.

When the two women above said that modern technology also affects our interest on Indonesian's cultural heritage, they probably don't know what we're doing on the internet. We use the internet to search about our country's cultural heritage, ...even right now i'm posting about it on my web!

2 Years ago, me and my friends, we tweeted about "Visit Indonesia 2010", even though it didn't trend worldwide. Our goal at the time was we want the world to see what a beautiful country Indonesia is.

So those things above prove that us youths, we do care, we do help, we do cherish, and we do appreciate the Indonesian's cultural heritage.