A civic dilemma
Some of my best Thai friends are red shirts.
Most of them are university graduates, some with degrees from abroad even, and they’re in management and making lots of money. But of course they are also grossly overpaid in relation to the income of the majority of people in Thailand. They receive official bank drafts for Bt50,000 or Bt60,000 every month, or more – just think of that, the same salary as a police general at the end of a long and successful career.
No more need be said about the latter, of course, because everybody knows a police general’s “salary” in Thailand doesn’t even cover the costs of the housemaids and chauffeurs, what is more the house(s), or the garage(s) where the designer cars are parked unused.
So why are some of my friends red shirts, even when they’re as corrupt as police generals?
They want to have their cake and eat it too, and that’s a big problem for Thailand’s new middle-class elite. I do understand that they’ve been educated to earn money, and that everybody expects them to do this, big time. So I’m sympathetic when they’re silent about the perks that go with their salaries, and how many fingers they have in how many pies, and how they fly off to Europe.
Of course they’re embarrassed when they’re with friends like myself, who are older and have sacrificed a lot to make the world a better place. My friends are bright, sensitive and interesting, and they understand very well that perks and fingers-in-the-pie are wrong. They also know that such corruption increases the injustice and inequality that so enrages the red shirts, and makes Thailand such an unfair place for the poor. But they just can’t help it because that’s just the way things are.
My upwardly mobile friends who are also red shirts think correctly, but they just can’t act upon what they think. They know that if they don’t do what they have to do they won’t get on – that somebody else will come along who has fewer scruples, take the job, and leapfrog them in the social order, based as the latter is entirely upon money.
Which is what makes it all the more remarkable that I have so many other sensitive, educated and truly dedicated Thai friends – teachers, nurses, activists – who are bitterly opposed to the so-called “amnesty” that will guarantee my newly rich Thai friends their good jobs for at least 10 or 20 years more. I have a lot of friends like the former too, and I always want to go down on my knees before them.
There’s another irony in all this. I’m a red shirt myself, though my pseudo-red-shirt friends often don’t realise this. I’m a red shirt who is dedicated to the red-shirt ideals of fairness and equality for the people, even though I can’t abide the inflammatory rhetoric of most of the red-shirt leaders. And I’m willing to sacrifice a lot for those ideals too.
My would-be red-shirt friends make all the right noises with their mouths, but their springs squeak with rust, and their wheels keep on spinning.
Lung Kip
Chiang Mai
