By being selfish

"People tend to see a problem from only one point of view: their own"

i read jakarta post today and found this good review from Rivandra Royono. He touched the hike of oil price and its impact to Indonesia's subsidies plan.

I like it when he said:

1. We can in fact significantly decrease the number of trees we chop down for paper by reusing and recycling paper. The problem with Indonesians is we have never had the incentive to do that. We never bother to print or copy on both sides of a paper; we never bother to collect our papers and recycle them.
2. To us, paper is cheap. And when a product is cheap, we tend to use it beyond our absolute needs. We pay much less for oil than we're supposed to.
3. There is something even more dire in our oil consumption at the present: We tend to forget that we need to save some for our children.
4. So while things are looking pretty gloomy today -- and nobody is denying the huge cost of increasing the domestic oil price -- we need to understand that most of us have been chanting the wrong demands for the last few months. We need to change our demands and, while we're at it, our behavior.

5. We should not demand cheaper paper. We should demand the government provide incentives for paper producers to recycle paper. We should demand school teachers and university professors to encourage -their students to print their assignments on used paper. And we should think twice before printing and copying any document we have.

   We should not demand the government maintain fuel subsidies. We should demand the government provide better public transportation and pedestrian facilities. We should demand the national electric utility continue and expedite its research on viable alternative energy for Indonesia. And we should stop circumventing the law and stocking up subsidized fuels in our garages.

6. We need to stop seeing problems from only one point of view. We need to stop focusing on our generation's interest alone. It is time to stop being selfish