Dear Pai Dao Din,
I don't know you personally, but I remember the first time I saw you. Months after the 2014 coup, you and your friends gate-crashed PM Prayut Chan-o-cha's speech in Khon Kaen, surprising his security detail and raising the three-finger salute. The photograph went around the world, and it is symbolic of our times: the awkward general looking down from the stage as the stunned guards surround the students, who are slightly nervous but committed to their act of rebellion.
It would also become an act that marked you, Jatupat Boonpattararaksa, as something of an enemy of the state, or at least the nuisance-in-chief, to be hounded and persecuted, to be hanged in the town square as a warning. Your defiance would be defined as criminality. Your family would soon brace themselves for frequent trips to the police station, courthouse and jail, going in hope and leaving in tears. To the state, every step you take, every protest you make, every smile you don't fake, they'd be watching you. No, they'd be coming for you.
And so you're in jail now, bail repeatedly denied, detention extended for another 12 days, all for the lese majeste crime of sharing an online article that over 2,000 people also shared. Your head looks best on a silver platter, it seems. You'll probably have to take your exam in jail -- the subject is computers, ironically, the simple skill of clicking "share" has put you there in the first place. You should've passed that exam with an A+. You're a law student. It means you have faith in the law, in its practitioners, in its social implications. But lately some people are wondering if faith alone is enough -- in suffering, in darkness, in the gloom of January where the the state decides it's best to keep you behind bars.
The court says you've failed to delete the post and further incited the public (with what?). We listen to the prosecutors and the judges. We contemplate the mystery that one person alone was picked out from a few thousand online sharers. We protested silently, or not so silently when nearly 4,000 people signed a petition for your release. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has also urged the court to grant you bail. But of course the UN isn't our father. In fact, who your father is is all that matters: If your father was a billionaire you wouldn't only get bail, you would have avoided prison in the first place even if you'd allegedly committed a more serious crime, like mowing down a policeman with your Ferrari.
In a place where murder is excusable and a Facebook post is not, where killers get bail and protesters do not, the issue is no longer about legality or the judiciary. The issue is humanity. Can we at least still have faith in that?
What strikes me about you is how your act of defiance seems natural -- it reminds us that it's something we all should do, regardless of the nature of the government. It's not about courage, though that's important, but about how you regard yourself as a responsible citizen in an open society. Only fools still believe that you're a greenhorn malcontent on an evil payroll whose job is to rile up the military government, totally oblivious to your protests during the Shinawatra years. Rebels without a cause are cool. Rebels with a cause, like yourself, are an extinct species, a rare, foolhardy type driven out of Thai society's DNA through years of wealth and bourgeois submission.
So what strikes me more is the level of apathy society has accorded to your case. News about your arrest and repeated rejections for bail flash across the TV with startling brevity, as if it was something too embarrassing to scrutinise at length, as if it was an insignificant footnote in our time of "reconciliation". There was no outrage and not much sympathy -- just think about how outrageous this would have been had it happened in the Yingluck Shinawatra administration. I suspect a fair share of people even think you deserve it. The decade of student activism is something most of us have read about, something from the adventure story of the 1970s, something that shouldn't be repeated in real life now because it is a disruption of peace, economy and harmony (except three years ago on the street of Bangkok, a "different" protest).
Hang in there, dear Pai, while we work, eat, read, write and pretend everything is all right. I don't believe in heroes but I do believe in grace. That will save you, and hopefully us too in the end.
Kong Rithdee is Life Editor, Bangkok Post.