“Never under­es­ti­mate the power of small group of highly com­mit­ted individuals”.

If Walt Disney was the mas­ter of ani­ma­tion, we, cit­i­zens of the youth­ful Republic of Indonesia are the mas­ter of drama.

Earlier this month, Prita Mulyasari, a cus­tomer assis­tant of a pri­vate bank in Jakarta was con­victed of defama­tion. She was ordered by the court to pay Rp 204 mil­lion ($22,000) as dam­ages to Omni International Hospital, and spent 3-weeks in jail.

The Prita v. Omni case went to national cen­ter stage, blog­gers unite and launched a “Pennies for Justice: Help Free Prita” cam­paign. Thanks to Y! Groups, Facebook, Twitter & the blogs, as of today (12÷17÷2009), Pennies donated from all over the coun­try reached over Rp 592 mil­lion ($62,000). The plan is to pay the fine entirely in Pennies deliv­ered straight to the hospital’s front door, today it is proven that noth­ing can beat the will power of small group of highly com­mit­ted individuals.

Koin Untuk Keadilan was launched in early December, in a lit­tle over 2 weeks, the orga­niz­ers have suc­cess­fully mobi­lized drop points, vol­un­teers & enough buzz to gather hun­dreds of mil­lion worth of hard-to-come-by Pennies (plus a Khong Guan ¹ bis­cuit can of for­eign and no longer in cir­cu­la­tion mints).

Never before in the his­tory of this coun­try that such a huge amount of money were gath­ered in such a short time in such a metic­u­lous was; most impor­tantly, this is a mon­u­men­tal moment to be remem­bered that Yes, we can stand up to injus­tice and not let the power walk away in arro­gance. If Obama can, so can we, one Prita is enough.

I’m sure there are many more cases of injus­tice that we left in over­sight, as well as many more touch­ing sto­ries that we has wit­nessed all over the world, what’s impor­tant is how we learn from it, and what can we do to over­rule a case of injus­tice to an inspi­ra­tion, how to flip arro­gance and turn it to an act of wisdom.

More about the case here, and head over to the blog (Bahasa Indonesia) or Translated ver­sion by Google here for some inter­est­ing behind-the-scene sto­ries, includ­ing a makeshift inven­tion of how to count pen­nies more effi­ciently.