I tried to explain to a friend in an e-mail about the Thai way of life. I wrote, "When I talk about their compassion, I'm not talking - 'oh if you are in desperate need of help, I can find someone else to help you' or even the little miracles that occur when someone steps in to assist you because you look like you are in desperate need - emotionally or physically. I'm talking about compassion in the sense that it warms you like a smile through your whole being. I'm talking - they are so unbelievably compassionate that people will do literally anything and everything to help you or make your life more comfortable, no matter if they just met you or have known you all of their lives. All it takes is you being present and they are brainstorming things to do for you - Thai or non-Thai. I can't even begin to describe how selfless the whole society is. I mean, imagine an entire city - a whole freaking city where everyone will drive you anywhere you need to go, feed you, take care of you, friend you, stop and talk to you, smile at you - all because you are a person".
Phuket is a tourist island, growing more and more jaded by the influx of tourism over the last couple of decades, but for the time being, the people continue to be remarkable and unbelievably pure of heart. Sure, you might pay the "farang" or foreigner price for your fisherman pants, but at the end of the day, I see God in my students and feel love like I've never felt before in a community.
Where does this compassion come from and when do we....well, grow out of it? In Flagstaff, Arizona, people see the influx of foreign persons in their communities as comparable to a sickness - a burden, like the seasonal flu, to be alleviated with a vaccine, a systematic poisoning of the body to strengthen it for increased resistance. In Flagstaff, Arizona, we have received our seasonal cold shot and we stand unwavering in the fight against invasion of alien bodies.
For this girl, among the collection of expats, wobbly on their motorbikes and regularly seeking medical attention for accidents caused while on these speedy little death traps - attempting to mimic Thais - dipping and dogging through traffic, I am not turned away from medical facilities, subjected to Halliburton detention facilities in the Arizona desert, nor am I regarded as a burden to be shaken from society's back. Sure, I have a visa and came by plane instead of via trail of tears across the Senora desert, yet I am a foreigner - a temporary worker with a different culture, language, and skin tone. In regard to foreigners, attitudinal differences between Thais and Arizonans couldn't be any more polarized. Absent of any immigration arguments coasting along as undertones in my post, fresh in my mind due to my former professor, Joel Olson, and his recent publication, To Live, Love, and Work Anywhere You Please: Arizona and the Struggle for Locomotion, an essay which is spot on in reinterpreting the debate regarding immigration and the goals of the undocumented community, (Joel and Luis Fernandez argue that the immigration debate has become more about mobility and the right to "locomotion" in the global realm than simply about acquiring citizenship - definitely worth checking out this short read), I'm left wondering, "what about the compassion for the 'other'?" Hindering the movement of people across borders is a contradiction in a world of global capitalism, where the mobility of labor is fundamental to supporting and maintaining business - business which has secured its right to be increasingly mobile. This means that global capitalism is at odds with the preservation of the nation-state. Why do laws attempt to paralyze workers, while in the same motion, giving more flexibility to economic forces instigating worker movement? Target the business workers, but not the business? In Thailand, we would say quizzically - "same same, but different?"
Well somewhere in the history of industry and capital and cogs in the machine, we "western worlders" forgot about people. Thailand hasn't forgotten about people. They share. They act selflessly. They remember all of the things that we learned back in the day about the golden rule, but unlike us, they didn't grow out of it.
I know that being a compassionate person isn't something that we learn to master from Sesame Street, 8th grade science, or Tyra Banks. I believe that it takes a lot of hard work and practice. One of my favorite blogs, zenhabits.net, (a blog which eerily seems to be updated daily with posts that perfectly answer my concerns at any given time...magic) states that compassion is about acknowledging and emphasizing with another person's suffering and working to alleviate their suffering. We can work on being selfless and compassionate every day. Think about it when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep at night. Decide that you want to live a life where you're never too old for compassion.
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” - Dalai Lama
I look around a bus full of karaoke singing high school students and realize I have a lot to learn.
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