A priority is, as most people know, the most important task at hand at any given moment. I learnt that fact when I was four and needed the toilet and wanted to play football both at the same time. Of course I made the wrong choice about where my priorities lay and ended up being too wet to play football.
Some pundits wonder whether Thais are focusing on the right issues—football or stopping crime. Five suspects are brought before a press conference after police arrested a gang for allegedly assisting applicants to cheat in police entrance examinations. Officers seized 10.5 million baht in cash paid by applicants to the suspects. PRASIT TANGPRASERT
Thailand is like that four-year-old version of me. We are a country that is so excited about the prospect of playing football that we forget if we want to play at our best, we must empty our bladder of all the nastiness going on inside our bodies. This week Thailand's national agenda is squarely focused on a number of issues that on a list of priorities should be located somewhere between "not important" and "huh? What are you babbling about?"
The ability of more than a million True Visions subscribers to watch Euro 2012, while high on my personal list of grievances, is not something I think the government should worry about. Nevertheless the never-ending debacle between True and GMM Grammy has now spilled over into the world of politics.
PM's Office Minister Woravat Au-apinyakul, who heads the Consumer Protection Board, wrote to the Union of European Football Associations (Uefa) to ask for a favour, to allow Grammy to transmit matches on any channel.
That's great, but in a country that has more problems than the Elephant Man's plastic surgeon, aren't there other things our politicians should be doing? Should we be hiring branding genius Tyler Brule to turn Thailand into the next Coca-Cola, or Nike or whatever it is he's doing?
Should our Culture Ministry be filing complaints to the police over an outfit that Lady Gaga wore during her concert three weeks ago?
Are these problems where our national agenda lies? Does the need for "saving face" with PR campaigns and government interventions in public disputes really override our real problems?
Problems like Thais dying in the streets!
Forgive me for being melodramatic but when there is yet another case of passersby getting killed during gang disputes, it does tend to feel like that.
This latest dispute, allegedly between students from Thaivichitsilp Art School and Don Muang Technical School left two dead and two injured is, according to the Metropolitan Police Bureau, just one of 385 student-related violent acts that have occurred since January.
Has this problem been pushed to the top of our national priorities list? Are top-positioned politicians writing letters? Are experts on gang warfare being hired to solve this pressing problem that is taking lives?
Or has the school in question been asked to close for three days, and is the Vocational Education Commission being told to end school feuding within three months or "face drastic action?" In case you weren't sure, we're going with the hilariously unrealistic second option.
Is it really so much to ask that the people whose pay slips come from my tax money, and whose bribes come at the expense of me having an efficiently run home, start doing some actual work, make some decisions and sort out some real problems?
And what about the highly disturbing case of would-be police cadets cheating during their entrance exams?
This sounds like something I would want to prioritise.
If my police force is either to stupid or too corrupt to pass their own exams, I want someone in a suit to do something about it.
I don't care if Thailand is the next cool destination after New York or London, but I do care if my policemen are cutting off dogs' heads with samurai swords, or are cheating on tests so they can then work in a job when they are supposed to punish those who break the rules.
But Thais don't like to make tough decisions. We love to act outraged about this and that scandal but when it comes to actually making a decision we flip-flop about saying "it's complicated" more than a 15-year-old's Facebook relationship status.
Here's an example that I would like to offer my country. In 2004 the European country of Georgia had a problem regarding corrupt traffic police. Newly elected president at the time Mikheil Saakashvili didn't really like corruption, and since he knew where his priorities lay he went ahead and got rid of all the country's traffic cops. As in he fired every last one of them!
In total he removed about 30,000 traffic police from their jobs. It was a tough decision, but it turned out to be the right one. Sure, Georgia didn't have any traffic police for a while, but the country survived and everyone knew that corruption would not be tolerated any longer.
Thailand is much like Georgia in that we have some deeply ingrained problems such as corruption and violence.
As such, we do not need guys like Tyler Brule to make us look pretty, we need people like Mikheil Saakashvili to kick our butts.
I don't know if Georgia has a cool and classy image, or if tourist numbers are high, but I do know that in 2010 Transparency International had this to say: "There is no other country at the moment where more people see a decrease in corruption in their country, and where more people say the government is effective in fighting corruption."
Thailand on the other hand is still running around like a four-year-old unable to decide whether to go for a wee, or whether to continue looking fabulous?
Arglit Boonyai is Multimedia Editor, Bangkok Post.