"YOU HAVE been mum about the political future of this government and Thailand," commented a visiting friend from the United States after not being able to get any answers from me to his repeated probing.
A few days prior, during a meeting, one participant told a story about her 11-year-old daughter. The girl was assigned homework during the school break - to find from any newspaper, examples of deeds that signify virtue or goodness. After trying earnestly for several days, she complained to her parents that she could not find any. Trying to help, the father pointed out to her one example from a page of a newspaper. It was a story about someone donating blood to the Red Cross.
"Is it really? Is that what virtue and goodness is about?" she sincerely asked.
Her honest question sent a chill down my spine. Are we, as a society, that lost?
During a recent trip to the Northeast, I stopped by an island called "Ta Node" after the name of a particular genus of trees that grow densely only on that specific strip of land, and refuse to grow elsewhere in the country, despite all attempts to transplant them. It is a place where people go to seek blessings from higher spirits; it is a dulcet, sacred milieu.
Along the walkway leading up to the islet, stands a row of trees. They all have colourful long bands of cloth tied around them. All have their bark stripped bare around the middle of the trunks. People have been peeling the bark off, looking for "good numbers" to buy lottery tickets. I would hear people shout out some numbers with glee. They "saw" those numbers in the tree trunks. The displayed greed on the faces of those number-poachers somehow reduced this auspicious place to the level of a dime-store diamond.
It is true that Thailand has an impressively high literacy rate of 94.1 per cent according to figures from Unesco's Institute for Statistics in September 2008. But what do students learn in school beyond reading, writing and maths? If you ask a Thai student about our history, you will get a blank stare. For a number of years now, Thai history has not been mandatory in the school curriculum. If we do not know where we are from, how can we know who we are, and where we go from here?
Without a well-placed and healthy self-respect that comes with the knowledge of and well-founded pride in our roots, we will remain with this delusional but impervious self-image. We insist that foreign friends who try to show us a different way of doing things, in a more efficient and transparent manner, must respect our "culture". If it is unclear what the term "culture" really means here, it is because it is devoid of any real meaning.
After years of neglect and abuse by policy-makers, our education system is a sham. We hardly notice it, and are clueless about how to fix it. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., an American poet, novelist and physician (1809-1894) once said that a child's education should begin at least 100 years before he's born. Ours takes it to the opposite extreme - it begins 100 years after a child is gone. The entire system has been so emaciated that we will have to start with the next unborn generation to make it right again. The larger question is: Who this generation will be and how many it will take to have the foresight, clout, determination and strength to buck the trend and go against the tide, knowing that the finish line could be only a maybe?
Children are learning from "role models" in society that it does not pay to be a good (if they know what it means), honest and decent individual. The old adage, good guys finish last, rings more true today than at any time before. Bad people are being rewarded, or rewarding themselves, for their badness, while good people are being excoriated and called fools. Lies can be uttered without being registered in the conscience (if it exists anymore) of the liar. They are simply a normal part of life. No big deal.
This is the kind of adult our society is bringing up these days.
More and more people are seeking solace from religion for the wrong reason - to deal with all sorts of personal problems and unhappiness - hoping to find an instant and easy answer. Many end up being less able to cope. Many get disillusioned with the hamartia [tragic flaw] of institutionalised faiths and beliefs, and completely tune out and turn off. All the while, the real core teachings of religions are given little attention or comprehension, let alone practice.
Being kind nowadays is more or less equivalent to being weak. Compassion has dried up. Everybody is out for himself. Spiritually, the world has become a desert, a dystopia. As a society, we used to have our safety net - not financially, but morally. We used to have a harmonious "rhythm" of life that served as an anchor and compass for our journey. Now we easily fly off the edge of the cliff unhindered with our fanaticism.
So why should it matter who will be in the seat of power one month, three months, or six months from now? It does not matter much who becomes the CEO of a ruined company. Unless and until we realise we have a problem, we will never find a solution.
A friend told a true story about seeing a man praying at a temple in the country where Gross National Happiness counts more than Gross National Product. He asked the man what he was praying for. "I prayed that our country does not become like Thailand," was the man's answer.
It is time we took a hard look at what and where we are, and try to change course. Governments come and go; and every single one seems equally capable of making more of a mess for the masses. But we the people can choose what kind of people we want future generations to consist of. They will then choose and charge our country's destiny based on what they are.
"In one and the same fire," said Francis Bacon (British essayist, philosopher and statesman, 1561-1626), "clay grows hard and wax melts."
We decide.