Americans, remember the moment when Occupy Wall Street seemed like it was on cusp of accomplishing something? Putting your finger on what exactly was difficult but it felt like there was a what there to be accomplished. Occupy was right, something needed to change. Then there was a window when it felt like something was going to give. And then it didn't.
After the moment passed Occupy limped on in what ultimately became pathetic fashion, like a past-past her/his prime athlete playing a couple of seasons after they’ve reached the bottom of the hill. The first couple of past-prime seasons on the way down the hill are endearing (aw, s/he loves the game so much), but after s/he reaches the bottom of the hill it's too gruesome to even gawk (ew, s/he needs to get a life). For decency’s sake you just want them to go away. Occupy got there in the dismal end.
For me there were two lessons from Occupy:
- Clearly Define Your Demands: If you're holding something hostage you can't ramble off the equivalent of Pee Wee Herman's bike theft evidence as the ransom.
- Have Plan B: You can't sleep in parks or major intersections and government buildings forever. At some point people need to go back to work or just get on with life.
There was definitely a moment a couple weeks ago when it felt like Bangkok Shutdown (BS... hey, that's the acronym) was going to accomplish something. What was as difficult to define as it was for Occupy but it felt like it was right there. Something needed to change. It seemed like something was going to give. Election day arrived on a Sunday. Voting was disrupted in some places and turnout was low but there was an election. Later that week the protesters voluntarily abandoned some shutdown locations to either double-down on critical sites or mask dwindling numbers, depending on your source. It felt like BS’s moment had slipped away.
The only positive thing I can say about Occupy in retrospect is they had the decency to go home in the end. They had their shot, it was there for the taking, they bungled it, and then held on too long. But when the end came in the form of cleaning crews with police escorts the Occupy folks went home vowing to return but probably knowing they wouldn't. Yesterday the BS protesters made it clear they aren’t going out like that.
For the first time in what feels like ages but is probably closer to two weeks, there was protest related violence. Unlike most or all of the prior violence this was unequivocally Protesters vs. Police instead of Protesters vs. Unknown. Shots were fired and explosive devices were thrown. Reports vary but it appears a few people died and a few dozen were injured. The protesters claim the police started it but photographs and foreign reporters seem to indicate otherwise (half of the injured and at least one of the dead were police).
Where was I when this was happening? Down the street. A couple kilometers away in (what else?) a shopping mall. I think I was taking this picture when it was happening.
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| Kaonashi turns her back on a Lamborghini store. |
I was sitting there allowing myself a little air-conditioning time to calm down. You may or may not know this about me but I'm prone to seeing the “red mist," as they say in English football broadcasts. That means when I turn a certain emotional corner I become completely irrational and liable to do something rash or stupid. It usually takes quite a bit to get me around that corner but once I arrive, forget about it. This is a big reason I need to quit playing football/soccer but in this case my rash challenge wasn't on a football pitch but at a BS checkpoint.
At the intersections where protesters have taken over they also serve as "police" monitoring checkpoints and redirecting traffic. It was hot and humid and I'd just had a cranky encounter at work so I wasn't exactly in the most placid states of mind when I approached the checkpoint. A BS “police” guy started blowing his whistle at me while an SUV inched its way out of the protest site in my direction.
The Thai lady in front of me stopped so I stopped. I assumed the SUV was going to slowly drive away and then we'd be able to pass but it stopped. I stood there a few moments looking around trying to figure out why it wasn’t going anywhere because there was nothing blocking its progress. Then a group of guys crowded around the back of the SUV, opened its hatchback and formed a line of people to unload bags of rice (or possibly sand but it looked like rice). This line was blocking my path and as soon as I understood that the whistling “police” guy intended to keep us standing there until they’d finished unloading the SUV the red mist descended.
The following paragraph will make it sound like I made some combative, macho choice. I didn’t. Basically I did all of this in a flash of non-thought. Here’s how I responded.
I didn't looked around for an alternative way around these guys and their SUV. A more profane version of this thought passed through my mind, "Who the frak do you think you are, you're not the police or the army, you're just some fraking guy with a whistle standing the fraking road." Playing my Tall, Anglo Farang (foreigner) Card I stepped around the Thai lady in front of me. My path past the BS Policeman was narrow because we were pinned between cars. He blew his whistle at me but I stared in his sunglasses as I squeezed past him then strode through the chain of dudes unloading the bags of rice.
Rash? Yep, the worst part is I know I'd reached the Square Up zone. When I get that wound up playing football and square up to someone in the back of my mind I know that I'm dealing with a middle-or-upper-class person who's probably never been in a fight in his life AND that I have much larger teammates in the vicinity to help should my first assumption fail. I have no illusions about my fighting abilities and had no idea about the background of this “police” guy but that's the power of the red mist. Had that BS policeman decided to call my Tall, Anglo Farang Card bluff and do more than whistle at me it's likely I would squared up and starting jawing down at him which certainly would have initiated a small mob pummeling me. Stupid? Absolutely, but the little Thai lady took the opportunity to follow in my wake so the retrospective cost-benefit analysis can't look a total wash.
As I sat in the mall calming and cooling down it occurred to me there is absolutely no way I would have acted that way had the whistle blower been an actual police officer employed by the government. I would have been annoyed and possibly looked for an alternate route around the situation but I'd never effectively dare a policeman to stop me. Stare him down as I brush past him thinking, "What are gonna do about it. Huh!? Huh!?" Never.
Despite my qualms about government in the US I find the order and security it provides comforting to a degree I can’t quantify. That's not something I fully realized about myself before yesterday sitting in front of the Lamborghini store. I'm comforted by order and shy away from chaos. It’s a comfort I wish all people enjoyed everywhere (especially in the US where it’s readily afforded to people who look like me and less so to varying degrees for people who--to be blunt--don’t look like me). I think I thought taking comfort in order was a univerisal human trait but now I'm not so sure. There appears to be a higher degree of cultural variance in the order-chaos spectrum than I realized.
The New York Times article about the violence yesterday mentioned that the US and EU have lauded the Thai government for maintaining a non-violent response to the protests. That belies the pro-government, pro-order bias in the US, Germany, etc but that doesn't make it any less commendable. If I was ready to risk a physical confrontation with a protester just because I was hot, annoyed, and wanted to walk down the street how indignant must the Thai and Bangkok governments be after weeks of the protesters squaring up to them and saying, "What are you gonna do about it? Huh?! Huh?!"
They’ve been doing that even after BS’s Plan A unequivocally failed. They wanted to stop the elections and didn’t. The point when people have to get back to work or get on with life is coming. For the first time I heard a Thai person say something unambiguously critical of the protests in public. I won't even try and describe how shocking it was because I can't think of an analogy for Americans that doesn't sound absurd. I wish I could say BS has sensed the shift and is vacating their protest sites, heading home and vowing to return with a new-and-improved Plan B but that doesn’t be seem to be the case. Plan B is a more aggressive form of Plan A.
I've been praying at the spirit house for the BS leaders to recognize it's time for a better Plan B because it’s never the leaders who are on the front lines, squaring up in the face of clubs, guns and bombs. It’s guys like the one I brushed past. Mercifully, even though I was the one ready to plunge into chaos, he was the one who kept a cooler head and let the provocation go unchecked. I pray there are a lot more like him in the protester ranks because, one way or another, Bangkok Shutdown is approaching its death throes and it’s ulitimately people like him who are going to determine how metaphorical that is.
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