an earthquake

Recently, whole world are shocked with the tragedy of earthquake that happen in Padang, Indonesia. Most of the sociologist comes with their own prediction about how the social structure will be affected.

From my stand of view, the societies will face a tremendous phenomenon in their everyday’s life precede with a changes in their routines activities. However, with different intention to take a lesson from the tragedy, either an individual or the social institutions outside the community move towards their own agenda by helping all the victims. For example, the scientists tend to advance their research in geographical disciplines, medical expertise appears with a suitable disease’s prevention methods, and the politician tries to expose their participation in developing the world.

To study an impact of the tragedy to the societies, my general outlook will focused in 4 major aspects which are economy, politics, psychology and most importantly, the religions.

Let’s start with the most vital portion which is religions. As we know, majority of the victims were the Muslims. For those who are appointed as an Ulama’, they have a tendency of viewing the situation as a disaster from God that need to be learned by the others. But, the issue here is, some of the Muslims stressed out the mistakes that had being done by the living community at Padang without taking any action to improve their own spiritual quotients. Did we have a thought that there must be a true Muslims living over there and also become a victim? Then, can we claim the situation is a disaster for that particular individual? The truth and the wisdom is belongs to the God. An error is, they actually expose the bad side of Muslims through his or her unchangeable self to others and lead other religions misinterpret the beauty of Islam. As a proof, our local newspaper which is Kosmo reported a few days ago that there are some Muslims claims that the tragedy was cause by the date of birth of Indonesia’s current Presiden, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Shockingly, the assumption was referred to a witchdoctor or known as “Bomoh”. Some things need to be done in order to revise the practical Muslims in the country that are widely known as a liberal country in South East.

In economical way, we can see that poverty among the society members become worse as the tragedy ended. How pity they are when their residence are destroyed. The poor people become poorer without facilitating their basic necessity that can help them to ensure their safety needs. Most of the victims also lost their farmhouse and the unemployment rate increases as the office lot, shops and the property are totally ruined. Money is important nowadays with a purpose of supporting the other needs including foods, medicines, and the educations. In their survival, they can’t afford all the expenses and required to restructure their routines activities to achieve a better standard of living. Instead of that, foreigners will not interested anymore in investing to the country because the tragedy strongly effect their profitability.

Politically, the earthquake raises a conflict within leadership arena. When we are talking about politics, it consist of the both ruler and opposition party. As a ruler party, the government of Indonesia faces many comments in term of positive comments and vice versa. If they are not strong enough to handle the situation to make a suitable feedback, and a total democratic system strongly applied, the civilian including the media industries will questioning their credibility. With a larger landscape, internationally, the comments and critics will successfully launch to achieve their own agenda. Political stability is a backbone of the glorious country. For the opposition party, they must give a hand strictly to defend their country from being colonized.

By manipulating the theories of thinking among Indonesian, a new issue will be highlighted to overcome to the true Islamic lifestyle according to Al-Quran and As-Sunnah. The westernize who are clearly rendering their intention to conquer an Islamic country in the middle east will take this as an opportunities to expand their new ideology colonization in order to strengthen the libertarian islam that effectively absorbed by the community. Psychological effects create a chaotic situation when there is a distinction between multi-religious fanatics and also among Muslim who are the majorities

For the conclusion, earthquake will strongly effect the societies in term of all 4 factors which are religions, politics, economic and psychological. Besides absorbing a new norms and values, people in the society claims that they need to make some changes in order for them to survive.