saco-indonesia.com, TIDAK SEMUANYA ANAK JALANAN MALAS
Suatu hari aku bermobil dengan beberapa teman. Di hampir setiap perempatan yang dilewati selalu ada sekumpulan orang. Mereka itu ngamen, ngemis, bawa bulu-bulu untuk membersihkan kaca mobil, jual koran, dsb. Kayaknya itu sudah menjadi pemandangan biasa di jalanan.
Di salah satu perempatan, ketika berhenti karena lampu lagi merah, seorang teman tiba-tiba berkomentar,
“Orang-orang itu malas banget. Mestinya mereka bisa bekerja dengan lumrah, bukannya malas-malasan ngemis dan nodongin orang.”
Komentar yang juga lumrah. Mereka itu tampak sehat walaupun dekil. Spontan aku turunkan kaca mobil. Kupanggil salah satu anak yang lagi mendekat membawa ecek-ecek dari tutup botol.
“Bang, temenku ini mau omong,” panggilku.
Temanku kaget. Pandangan melotot mengandung ancaman diarahkan kepadaku. Tetapi, dia mengulang celutukannya tadi. Dengan kalimat yang lebih sopan, tentunya. Si anak remaja itu dengan tenang mengulurkan tangan tertadah ke dalam mobil dan berkata,
“Kalau Oom bisa memberi saya pekerjaan…apa pun…cabutin rumput, ngurusin sampah, bersihin wc…akan saya kerjakan, Oom.”
Di depan, lampu hijau menyala. Tidak ada waktu lagi buat ngobrol, diskusi, atau pun rapat. Kuletakkan dua logam limaratusan di tangannya sembari pamit dan cabut.
Sambil mengemudi, kurasakan kata-kata si remaja tadi menghantami benakku. Betapa sering aku sendiri menggeneralisasi orang-orang ini. Berada di jalanan berarti malas, tidak mau cari pekerjaan yang layak, tidak mau kerja keras, memilih cara yang gampang untuk cari duit, dst. Vonis yang kayaknya terlalu pagi. Bisa jadi dari antara mereka memang ada yang seperti itu. Tapi, mestinya ada juga orang-orang yang sudah berusaha – dengan cara mereka – dan selalu ketemu jalan buntu. Pasti ada pula yang memang sungguh terdesak dan jalanan menjadi solusi.
Aku jadi ingat anak-anakku. Kebanyakan dari mereka berada di jalanan bukan karena malas. Ada yang lari karena tidak diakui sebagai anak oleh orang tua. Ada yang orang tuanya terlalu miskin untuk menghidupi terlalu banyak anak. Beberapa sudah tidak punya orang tua. Mereka bekerja di jalanan agar tetap bisa makan. Syukur kalau masih bisa sekolah dari hasil ngamen. Aku kenal dua-tiga anak yang keluar dari sekolah dan ngamen untuk biaya sekolah adik-adik mereka. Jalanan menjadi solusi bagi orang-orang ini. Tetapi, semua fakta itu ternyata belum mempertobatkan persepsiku tentang hidup di jalanan.
TIDAK SEMUANYA ANAK JALANAN MALAS
Even as a high school student, Dave Goldberg was urging female classmates to speak up. As a young dot-com executive, he had one girlfriend after another, but fell hard for a driven friend named Sheryl Sandberg, pining after her for years. After they wed, Mr. Goldberg pushed her to negotiate hard for high compensation and arranged his schedule so that he could be home with their children when she was traveling for work.
Mr. Goldberg, who died unexpectedly on Friday, was a genial, 47-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur who built his latest company, SurveyMonkey, from a modest enterprise to one recently valued by investors at $2 billion. But he was also perhaps the signature male feminist of his era: the first major chief executive in memory to spur his wife to become as successful in business as he was, and an essential figure in “Lean In,” Ms. Sandberg’s blockbuster guide to female achievement.
Over the weekend, even strangers were shocked at his death, both because of his relatively young age and because they knew of him as the living, breathing, car-pooling center of a new philosophy of two-career marriage.
“They were very much the role models for what this next generation wants to grapple with,” said Debora L. Spar, the president of Barnard College. In a 2011 commencement speech there, Ms. Sandberg told the graduates that whom they married would be their most important career decision.
In the play “The Heidi Chronicles,” revived on Broadway this spring, a male character who is the founder of a media company says that “I don’t want to come home to an A-plus,” explaining that his ambitions require him to marry an unthreatening helpmeet. Mr. Goldberg grew up to hold the opposite view, starting with his upbringing in progressive Minneapolis circles where “there was woman power in every aspect of our lives,” Jeffrey Dachis, a childhood friend, said in an interview.
The Goldberg parents read “The Feminine Mystique” together — in fact, Mr. Goldberg’s father introduced it to his wife, according to Ms. Sandberg’s book. In 1976, Paula Goldberg helped found a nonprofit to aid children with disabilities. Her husband, Mel, a law professor who taught at night, made the family breakfast at home.
Later, when Dave Goldberg was in high school and his prom date, Jill Chessen, stayed silent in a politics class, he chastised her afterward. He said, “You need to speak up,” Ms. Chessen recalled in an interview. “They need to hear your voice.”
Years later, when Karin Gilford, an early employee at Launch Media, Mr. Goldberg’s digital music company, became a mother, he knew exactly what to do. He kept giving her challenging assignments, she recalled, but also let her work from home one day a week. After Yahoo acquired Launch, Mr. Goldberg became known for distributing roses to all the women in the office on Valentine’s Day.
Ms. Sandberg, who often describes herself as bossy-in-a-good-way, enchanted him when they became friendly in the mid-1990s. He “was smitten with her,” Ms. Chessen remembered. Ms. Sandberg was dating someone else, but Mr. Goldberg still hung around, even helping her and her then-boyfriend move, recalled Bob Roback, a friend and co-founder of Launch. When they finally married in 2004, friends remember thinking how similar the two were, and that the qualities that might have made Ms. Sandberg intimidating to some men drew Mr. Goldberg to her even more.
Over the next decade, Mr. Goldberg and Ms. Sandberg pioneered new ways of capturing information online, had a son and then a daughter, became immensely wealthy, and hashed out their who-does-what-in-this-marriage issues. Mr. Goldberg’s commute from the Bay Area to Los Angeles became a strain, so he relocated, later joking that he “lost the coin flip” of where they would live. He paid the bills, she planned the birthday parties, and both often left their offices at 5:30 so they could eat dinner with their children before resuming work afterward.
Friends in Silicon Valley say they were careful to conduct their careers separately, politely refusing when outsiders would ask one about the other’s work: Ms. Sandberg’s role building Facebook into an information and advertising powerhouse, and Mr. Goldberg at SurveyMonkey, which made polling faster and cheaper. But privately, their work was intertwined. He often began statements to his team with the phrase “Well, Sheryl said” sharing her business advice. He counseled her, too, starting with her salary negotiations with Mark Zuckerberg.
“I wanted Mark to really feel he stretched to get Sheryl, because she was worth it,” Mr. Goldberg explained in a 2013 “60 Minutes” interview, his Minnesota accent and his smile intact as he offered a rare peek of the intersection of marriage and money at the top of corporate life.
While his wife grew increasingly outspoken about women’s advancement, Mr. Goldberg quietly advised the men in the office on family and partnership matters, an associate said. Six out of 16 members of SurveyMonkey’s management team are female, an almost unheard-of ratio among Silicon Valley “unicorns,” or companies valued at over $1 billion.
When Mellody Hobson, a friend and finance executive, wrote a chapter of “Lean In” about women of color for the college edition of the book, Mr. Goldberg gave her feedback on the draft, a clue to his deep involvement. He joked with Ms. Hobson that she was too long-winded, like Ms. Sandberg, but aside from that, he said he loved the chapter, she said in an interview.
By then, Mr. Goldberg was a figure of fascination who inspired a “where can I get one of those?” reaction among many of the women who had read the best seller “Lean In.” Some lamented that Ms. Sandberg’s advice hinged too much on marrying a Dave Goldberg, who was humble enough to plan around his wife, attentive enough to worry about which shoes his young daughter would wear, and rich enough to help pay for the help that made the family’s balancing act manageable.
Now that he is gone, and Ms. Sandberg goes from being half of a celebrated partnership to perhaps the business world’s most prominent single mother, the pages of “Lean In” carry a new sting of loss.
“We are never at 50-50 at any given moment — perfect equality is hard to define or sustain — but we allow the pendulum to swing back and forth between us,” she wrote in 2013, adding that they were looking forward to raising teenagers together.
“Fortunately, I have Dave to figure it out with me,” she wrote.
Dave Goldberg Was Lifelong Women’s Advocate