I finally got all my thoughts together about the CT and wanted to share what I posted on Facebook about the incident.
I just hate to see all the victims subjected to the same song and dance. People care for a few weeks max and news programs saturate the story to high heaven. Not only does no real change stem from what we learn from these tragedies, these same feeling we harbor for a few weeks are never applied to when we bomb families and children just like the ones in that school. But of course those people don’t matter because they don’t live here. Because they’re Afghani/Iraqi/whatever. BUT THEY ARE JUST LIKE US. They get jacked almost on the daily and no one cares anywhere close to the level that we care about this shooting. But that is over here. It just over here, over there.
At least it makes the news in the US when it happens. Teachers have become a main target in Thailand’s southern insurgency, and at least one gets killed on most days of the week down there. But it’s become so commonplace that it barely rates a mention in the newspaper. Maybe a paragraph.
Muslim. Our Deep South, the portion of Thailand near Malaysia, is majority Muslim. Trouble seems to spring up once every 20 or 30 years, but this time it’s been especially tenacious. Next month will mark I believe it’s nine years for the latest round, which is rather lengthy. No one’s sure exactly who the leaders are or what they want. They just kill. Soldiers and police sure, but farm workers too. Doctors and other medical personnel plus teachers have become major targets. And Buddhist monks. They keep burning down schools too. The locals have dreamed in the past of breaking away from Thailand and maybe even joining with Malaysia, but Malaysia is adamant it doesn’t want the area. But Malaysia’s northern-peninsula states – especially on the east side of the peninsula – are extremist, and word is there may be some funding coming from that area. You hear from time to time that the Thai government is holding “secret talks” with the leaders, but if that is ever true, nothing seems to come of it.
It’s become so bad that medical-school graduates have been caught hacking into government computers to change their assignments to other parts of the country if they find they’re being sent to the South. (They have to do community service as doctors for a couple of years after graduating, and they have to go wherever the government sends them.) And so many rubber-plantation workers were being murdered that the plantations had to start importing labor from Laos. Unfortunately, they neglected to tell the Lao workers about the dangers, and soon their slaughter almost threatened to turn into a diplomatic incident.
It’s really a fucked situation down there.
And see? After writing all of the above, I went ahead and took a look at the website for the Bangkok Post, and this just happens to be their lead story: Teachers Tell of Lessons in the Firing Line
There are plausible reports that whoever the leaders are, they receive at least some funding and maybe even training from Jemaah Islamiyah, which is al-Qaeda’s Southeast Asian branch. They were behind the Bali bombings.
Lest I scare people away from visiting Thailand, I would mention that nine years on, it’s very much contained to the very Deep South, only a handful of provinces near Malaysia. Occasionally they strike out at the large town of Hat Yai, but that’s about as far as it gets. The main southern resort island-province of Phuket, rathole that it is, remains perfectly safe, as do nicer southern places such as Krabi, Phang-Nga and the upper peninsula. There were fears early on that the perps might try to hit Bangkok, but that has never happened.
And BBC just a moment ago had Breaking News that 10 girls aged 9-11 were just blown up by an old landmine this morning (Monday morning) in eastern Afghanistan. Seems they inadvertently set it off while chopping wood.
Well, there you are. It’s harder for people to get mad about that sort of thing than a school shooting because, apart from happening in another country, it does not involve any act of malice directed at those little girls in particular. For that matter, how do we even know whom to get mad at? There’s no way of knowing whether such a mine was laid by the Soviets or the Americans or the Mujahedeen or the Taliban or any of Afghanistan’s regular governments or armies in the past several decades.
I recently ran across a photo of a bunch of Pakistani kids setting up a little sidewalk shrine w/ candles and such, next to a placard that read something like “People of Connecticut: we feel for you as you would feel for us”.
No kidding, it took me a good few seconds to process that it probably wasn’t meant ironically.