Monumental Protest

This week‘s Photo Challenge is about capturing a monument.

It was quite a task for me to answer this challenge as I have a few photos of memorable monuments to choose from. After much consideration, I decided to put up this photo of Euro monument.

This photo was taken in winter 2011, when the Occupy Movement all around the world was in the verge of being evicted. It was a cold, grey, windy afternoon in Frankfurt and a bunch of friends and I were walking past the European Central Bank headquarters.

The reason that I chose this photo is because there is one hashtag topic that is currently quite popular in Indonesia. The hashtag topic is #menolaklupa, which could be freely translated into “refuse to forget”. This hashtag topic is widely used in social media to remind Indonesians about unresolved problems, such as Lapindo and human rights issues, which are now becoming less and less popular.

In the spirit of “refusing to forget”, I feel that this photo reminds me (and hopefully others too) about Occupy Movement’s incredible effort to remind us about the social and economic inequality. I extremely like their catch-phrase “we are the 99-percent” – I even accused a London-based corporate lawyer for being one of the “1-percent”s (poor guy, he probably never planned on earning gazillion quids per month). And while the sites occupied by the Occupy Movement are now clear from any form of protests, we shall refuse to forget about the issue of social and economic inequality. Especially after Oxfam released their report on the huge gap between the rich and the poor earlier this year (spoiler: according to to the report, the money from 100 world richest billionaires could end poverty and again, and again, and again).

I refuse to forget this monumental protest!