In the spirit of compassionate detachment:
I have to admit to a mild guilt - the guilt of a person who has escaped a shaking building in the throes of an earthquake, watching from a distance, listening to the wails of those who can't, or won't, get out. Not abandonment – more; a beckoning, a frantic waving of the arms for those inside to follow me to safety (not paying much attention the the fact that the ground beneath my feet is also rolling).
Thailand has its own cache of self-serving politicians and the government is in flux - no one knows how it will right itself. I'm watching both the US and Thai scenes from a lounge chair on a shaded balcony. I (almost ashamedly) no longer feel the need to voice my opinions on the frays, or even to visit my opinions on myself. I have no notion of up, or down, but the sense of right and wrong hangs on tenaciously and nags, despite the protestations of my quieted soul. Of it all, I'm experiencing incredible relief after a lifetime of frustration, anger and disgust over the greed, injustice, dishonesty and downright murderous actions of authoritarians who have been granted, or forcibly taken control of large populations.
I'm addicted to my new personal peace, although I freely admit that this new peace is a fabrication - only a mirror in a wishing well. This novel sensation of tranquility is an illusion so well constructed that barely the faintest of reality's light flickers through it's stitches at the seams. It's not that I no longer care - I do and I always will - it's more that I no longer choose to look at the angst. I adjust my blinders frequently. The stillness, the calm, feels too good.
The notion of acquiring this wonderful feeling took form slowly over the years, much of it constructed during dinner conversations with equally disgusted and frustrated friends who kept their ears to the ground while monitoring humanity's inhumanities. Invariably, someone in the group would say, "Let's move to Mexico, or Canada, or (name a country other than the US)." Heads nodded and suggestions for utopian relocations were tossed on the table next to the dessert dishes. There is no utopian destiny, of course, and it was just a way of sprinkling a little sugar on the inescapable bitterness of enigmatic realities and frustrating politics.
Serendipity, chance and god-knows-what brought me to Phuket seven years ago. I had been in Thailand briefly in 1960, but I barely knew the geography of this part of the planet and even less about the Thai culture. I fell in love with Thailand immediately. Don't ask me what it was about it that I fell in love with – I haven't figured it out yet – at least not in a way that is easily definable.
Perhaps it is the feeling that I have stepped back in time – back to the gloriously naïve days of the nineteen-fifties, when there was no gray band between black and white, right and wrong, happiness and sorrow; all mixed in with the unshakeable belief that my elected leaders held sacrosanct the best interests of all citizens and all world citizens, regardless of economic standing, or geographic location. We had, after all, just saved the world from the conflagration of Nazi and Japanese aggression. Americans were puffed up with the victory and rightly so. The world in general was grateful for the sacrifice and expense of stemming an enormous political adjustment that had threatened to change the world's demographics.
The naïve fifties are somehow revisited again in my life in Thailand, if only in the musties of my mind. (I may, in fact, be romancing the stone, but I don't care – it's real enough to me.) Structure, respect and form are at the core of it. I'm a left-leaning liberal, but I love the façade of conservatism. Make any sense? Maybe not, but that's what I experience here in Thailand and I like it. The junk, the nastiness under the surface – the nastiness that never goes away – the crap one always wants to escape – is under the carpet here, just as it was in the US during the forties, when, for instance, no one admitted that Roosevelt and Churchill bartered Poland into Stalin's Russian slavery at Yalta. Well, nothing so earth shattering as that is going on here, but it is just as easy for me to escape whatever shenanigans do go on here and in the rest of the world as it was back in the US during the fifties.
I've become an ostrich. My head is in the sand and fate will determine whatever might happen to my exposed butt. I like it. I've removed myself from disgruntled dinner conversations and plunked myself into a society whose language I don't understand, so local politics are garbled and unimportant. My momentary concerns are purely temporal and I'm allowed the one thing I thought I might never achieve – daily bliss. I've abandoned not a thing – my loyalties and beliefs remain intact, but it's cozy here with my head in the sand and if my ass (sticking up in the air as it is) gets blown away – well... it ain't going to alter the smile on my beak, and any flickering sensation of pain will hardly make a noise in my pea brain.
