We begin with a Question

The last few years, have seen their fair share of political upheavals. What would the first half of this decade be without the Arab Spring? What is to become of Venezuela? How can we reach a critically equitable solution to the Ukrainian problem, which threatened to throw the entire world back thirty years? So when I heard about the problems in Thailand, like so many others, I thought I had some general idea about where this was going. I thought that this was the next Domino. As I prepared to take a job in that country for nine months, I did my research and learned that I might have been mistaken. And getting here today I now know that I don’t get it at all. Whatever Thailand is said to be in the media or over a water cooler, that isn’t what greeted me. I flew into a country under Martial Law, and didn't realize it until I was two minutes late for mandatory curfew, and lost in a dark and alleyway market.  It also seemed I wasn't the only one who forgot about it— it seems the crowds of native Thai’s, and the police did as well.

‘Life goes on as usual, this is nothing new’. This is the message that I got from everyone who had actually been in Thailand for an extended amount of time, or was living in the land during the coup. Of course, my employers could have been lying to get me to continue to accept moving half way across the world to a country with a destabilizing (turned non-active) government. But this was told to me by friends, by mentors, and by people who had taken the trip themselves and had nothing to lose by telling me the truth. Nevertheless, my nervousness persisted. But the truth is Thailand is not a powder keg. It’s not going to blow any second. It’s probably not going to blow at all. How can this be? We all saw the protests on TV, and we saw how passionate the parties were against each other. But as I saw myself in a crowd of people— people not running home as curfew loomed ever closer, I knew that something different was happening here. Folks in Thailand seem actually pretty relaxed— scratch that— insanely relaxed. How can this dichotomy persist? How can the Land of Smiles also be the Land of the Repeating Coup, averaging about one every six years? This is what this blog is going to be about. I want to look at Thailand in the light of Contemporary Political Thought, Ancient Buddhist philosophy, the on the ground experience of an amateur philosopher from the West in a country he doesn't understand. I hope to post daily here, but I don’t know how reliable my internet will be, and I don’t know my schedule. Likely most posts, like this one, will be hastily planned in the morning on a piece of tissue paper and cobbled together late at night, instead of sleeping. I hope we can all learn something.