The news seems to be particularly bleak at present with continuing bushfires, impending war, the rail crash of a few days ago with nine people dead and now the loss of the Space Shuttle with all on board. As this list indicates, the news tends to made up mostly of the bad things that are happening at any given time, while good things tend not to be news.

Rereading the comments thread from this post on Australia and Indonesia three months ago, I was struck by the universally gloomy tone regarding the prospects for Indonesian democracy and the survival of Indonesia as a state.

Only three months later prospects seem a lot better. As Scott Wickstein has noted, the Indonesian police have confounded expectations with their success in catching not only those directly involved in the Bali bombing, but those further up the hierarchy (no-one convicted yet, but the evidence seems pretty damning).

In the process, the whole trend towards militant Islamism seems to have been halted. Not only has much of Abu Bashir’s JI network been arrested but the equally nasty Laskar Jihad group, responsible for thousands of deaths in communal rioting announced its disbandment shortly after Bali. Disappointingly, its leader was just acquitted on a charge of inciting religious violence but the disbandment seems to have been permanent.

Even more surprisingly, the cease-fire in Aceh seems to be holding for the most part, though there have been the inevitable incidents.

The economy is still in a mess, but the crisis period is past. An essential part of the transition to stable democracy is the recognition that the economy is going to be in a mess a good deal of the time and that neither generals nor revolutionaries are likely to fix it. It’s my optimistic impression that this fact is beginning to sink in with the Indonesian public and, equally importantly, with the military. Demonstrations against recent cuts in subsidies are, or at least should be, part of the democratic process.

In the end, it seems impossible to balance good and bad news. We must grieve for those who have lost loved ones in the latest tragedies without giving way to despair or giving up the hope of making things better.