Rich not helping

re: "Covid crisis compounds new school-term woes" (BP, July 2, 2020) 

Dear editor,

Reading the story of the woman caught stealing school uniforms for her children, who would not be touched by the human kindness of the other shoppers in the store who banded together to help the poor woman from their own meagre pockets? It reminds us that when faced with their immediate distress, the natural impulse of ordinary people in Thailand as everywhere else is to help those in need.

My immediate thought was that it is perhaps time to abolish uniforms when they cause such needless misery. The second series of thoughts were: Why has the Thai government failed to help this family and the many others like them in desperate need due to the Covid emergency? Why are the filthy rich of Thailand not asking, not demanding, to be taxed far more to help their fellow Thais in need?

Then there was the less pleasant reflection that the inhuman "law and order" zealots in government, those who insist on strict compliance with them to excuse every act they commit irrespective of justice, fairness, or simple human decency, doubtless wanted the poor mother to be imprisoned because she broke their laws made up to protect the corrupt Thai status quo founded on a long history of coups against the Thai people.

Finally, the story in the same article of the police officers who chipped in to help the woman whose daughters' uniforms had been stolen from the washing line, presumably by another poor parent also reduced to desperation by the burden of the Covid emergency measures whose brunt has been unfairly borne by the poor, reminds us that even the Thai police are in person not so heartless as Thai law would have them be.

As the ongoing Covid emergency highlights, perhaps many of the traditional corruptions that have long beset Thailand are rooted in unjust law protecting a heartless system that rejects natural human goodness to instead profit only a small number of Thais at great economic, social, and moral cost to the wider Thai society.

 Felix Qui

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on July 3, 2020, under the title "Rich not helping" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1945036/slim-state-albatrosses