No Leftovers

It’s Mother’s Day, a national holiday in Thailand. I spent most of the day working from home and after making some serious headway on a proposal I was writing, planned on rewarding myself with a little late night pork infusion.

After living here for four years you would think I’d learn to just expect the unexpected. Still, I was startled to see a group of twenty or so motorbikes barge their way into an intersection and cutting through the oncoming traffic, surely on the way to whatever summit I had seen other smaller packs of noisy moped riders speeding off to join.

They didn’t have the right away. They didn’t have the bigger vehicle. They didn’t have helmits.

They did have attitude. They did have numbers. They did have badass-bad hair.

Perhaps watching the riots all week has made me paranoid, but I realized I had witnessed a protests of sorts. Not as bold or malicious as the events in London— but with the same stroke of empowering defiance.

What lessons should Thailand be learning from London’s riots? Are they the same lessons the previous government failed to pick up on when the smoke cleared last year?

More importantly, how do you engage youth who feel recognized and powerful for the first time defying traffic in a motorcycle gang—- when you can’t engage a people who felt recognized and powerful for the first time when buildings went up in smoke?

If these are signs that an increasingly growing number of marginalized youth are crying out for acknowledgement, I hope we notice before it’s too late.