Homesickness misdiagnosed

Clara Holzer, reading your letter kind of made me feel like I was in the Twilight Zone. I said nothing about the present government. My subject was Westerners and their Thai clones constantly writing letters calling for more laws and more regulation in Thailand. I have been reading these comments for 18 years and it is becoming tiresome. After every holiday season there is a flurry of letters calling for more cops issuing more tickets and more stringent enforcement of traffic laws. If they were heeded, the result would be more cops, more taxes and more control. Foreigners want the food carts off of the sidewalks. Goodbye, local culture and colour. Foreigners want more domestic-violence arrests. Hello, lawsuits and police entering homes. 

Foreigners want dual-pricing abolished, even though they pay less here than they would in most countries, but they are still concerned that Thais are paying less. Foreigners are pushing for women’s rights and animal rights. That would only lead to courts backlogs of gender-bias lawsuits against businesses countrywide and the need for licences for animals. 

I could go on with this, Clara, but I hope you now understand my letter had nothing to do with the present government. 

The problem with all these letters is that they are coming from people who have not been here that long and do not understand that the culture is primarily based on live and let live – stay out of my business and I will stay out of yours. What foreigners are calling for is the beginning of a litigious society with everyone suing everyone else for real or imagined slights. I would imagine that they miss home. They like Thailand, but they want more of what they are accustomed to. 

Clara, I would appreciate it if you would never try to put me into a jackpot with the present government again. If I am to get into trouble with them, I would hope it would be for something I said, not something that you read into what I said. 

John Arnone