I’ve lost track of time, the realms offer distraction and no relief, though I’ve completed several tasks, namely the case study for the sex worker clinic in Pattaya. Then the journey back to Phnom Penh, where I listened to the concerns of the Cambodian sex worker community along with their counterparts from Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia and India. Police abuse, rigid health care, uncompromising society and the lack of funding, are among the many problems faced by sex workers and their families.

I’m back in Bangkok, where traffic conditions, urban pollution and color-based politics have reach a screeching point, where the educated elites are in their constant political brawl against what they call the uneducated buffaloes, the peasants and those not fit for governance and whatever names are fit for that moment where the grand stage of vociferation is blinking with neon lights and the aura of arrogance.

Even when the slaughter in the south, the brewing poverty and fermentation of a servitude mentality. Someone has to keep the political elites happy, and the masses serve that purpose.  Foreigners and locals, from clumps of solidarity, bent on ultra nationalism and hording power simply because they can, people spend more time on politics and the fuckery that comes along with it.

Just yesterday, a Thai court ruled that the government plans to amend the constitution are illegal, and rejected the opposition’s demand to dissolve the ruling Pheu Thai party.

Aye, for countless times, the skirmish leads to bitter disappointment for one party to another, from one elite to another.

A chessboard scenario, with mix-matched foes, allies and those who willing to switch sides at a moments notice, or when the bank account is seemingly filled with the Thai Baht.

You’ll find some of the elites and the opposition Democrat Party, wearing black in celebration, blowing whistles and waving mini-Thai flags around the shopping malls and in the heart of Bangkok consumerism, that vibrant capitalistic city. The “Black Shirts” stand against their countrymen, the “Red Shirts” – a pro-government movement.

Even as they protest or show support, the largely ignored population of urban poor are left in the gutters. Bangkok’s city hall, led by a ever-grinning governor who is unpopular among the poor, is busy cleaning the streets of undesirables, particularly the homeless and those living in destitution. Conformity to the expectations of elitism is norm, and so is the virtue that money moves mountains in Thailand. Foreigners mocking the locals, the locals retaliating against foreigners, a cycle of madness that naturally makes no sense to the ostracized.

I sense that the right wing, patriots and the lazy are just interested to turn their country to a mass breeding ground for the serfs and to keep them uneducated for the upper middle class to feast upon. Societal cannibalistic appetite, a byproduct of domination and political theories that the prestigious corporate elites and their lackeys will maintain the barn for the animals to live.

I do not claim to have penetrated the psyche of a Thai zealot, nor determine the depth of their patriotism. But I do understand their greed, I know, immoderately desirous of wealth and gain. Not different to persistent avariciousness of the foolish mortal anywhere, a dent in humanity, a rot of the soul.