Our future is the Philippines

Let’s look at the more mundane issue of traffic chaos at ground level for the vast majority of Thais, most of whom rarely if ever fly, and the rest of Bangkok’s gridlocked residents.

 One can land at Suvarnabhumi or Don Mueang, be off the plane in 15 minutes and at the front of the immigration line, which is not too bad these days, unless some bottleneck suddenly appears from a slew of arrivals. Within another 15 minutes it’s possible to be on the Airport Rail Link/MRT/BTS or on the road to your destination, almost around the clock (of course, not a lot of people going out after midnight). Try getting from the majority of those expensive, near-empty Rail Link stations to most places in the city, however, and you’ll find as long a trek as your arriving flight took from a bordering country! 

Bangkok is sinking into the same morass (literally) as the Philippines experienced under Marcos. Look at Manila, and see the future. There is horrible traffic congestion and air quality most of the time in Bangkok, endemic corruption, low-paid masses trapped in urban decay, low productivity, high bureaucracy, desperate political conditions, and a huge wealth inequality gap. These are coupled with a paternalistic/feudalistic society and a lax and apparently corrupt law-enforcement/justice system. 

What the Philippines needs next are lots of expensively adorned temples, cash-rich corrupt monks and a costly failure of an education system. They already have a southern Muslim insurgency of their own with no permanent solution in sight.

Let’s hope the riotous Thai rubber farmers don’t tap into that scenario. Maybe they should become rice farmers like their pro-government subsidised northern neighbours, since the rice-fed pork barrel tap for them is ever flowing. Let’s play the new version of rubber, rice, paper! Wow, rice wins – again! Wake me up when it’s over.

Bang Na

Bangkok