About Terrorists and Machetes

All in one day.
To find out the Bangkok Airport has been occupied by demonstrators and be relieved that a sister, and also an aunt, had left Thailand already and avoided an inconvenient if not volatile situation. To hear from my coworker that he has just lost a brother, an American-educated veterinarian who died as a result of having diabetes. (Would that have happened if he stayed in the U.S. instead of coming back at their father's request, I wonder.) To go online and find out a friend is in Mumbai and fine, but that one friend of hers got injured and several of them were among the kidnapped and later let go. And earlier in the day, you could see from our balcony a couple of construction workers chasing their boss with machetes. All made me think: Life is precious, and pretty fragile, after all.

Good timing is helpful and luck never hurts, but the boss escaped death because he ran fast enough and because of two nearby policemen. In this neighborhood, there are, almost always, policemen within running + shouting range. So, the chase ended there, faster than in movies. The handling of the situation then was rather.. different: No arrests were made.

This was practically in our backyard, which, with all the vegetation around and undeveloped area, resembles the mountainous countryside more than the heart of a capital city. Apart from the other construction workers (the ones who didn't pick up their machetes), we on our balcony were the only spectators. The policemen told the boss to leave after a brief conversation with him. Then the policemen stood there, calm and relaxed, to let one furious man after another describe at full length the injustice they are subjected to, working for this boss.

Capitalism in its purest, fucked-up form. It's not unusual here for a construction site manager or boss to hire workers to do a job and not pay them for it. Unable to sue or do anything, most just stop working and leave when they've had enough. Because the unemployment rate is sky-high, maybe the boss continues this practice for some time, and maybe the workers who'd barely be making enough to feed their families go on to be exploited by another such boss or two. Or more. That's why policemen who stop them before any physical harm has been done show sympathy, tell them not to lose their cool, and then act like nobody just tried to commit murder. Fortunes are made developing real estate, so a boss who even denies his construction workers the 3$ a day probably deserves to see some machetes, but what do I know. This is why in the West, they have labour law und labour unions with leverage* - so there's no need for blood to be spilt.

On a personal level, there was nothing for me to be overly dramatic about. It only feels like things were matters of life and death today, more literally so than they normally are.



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* West 2 - 2 East