So which side are you on, dear reader?
Come on. Don't beat around the bush. The future of our relationship depends on your answer.
Such are the times we are in, as we enter this Emergency Decree Era after the Bangkok Shutdown of two weeks ago.
Speaking of which, may I digress for just four paragraphs? The leading contender for Headline Of The Year appeared just twelve days into 2014 on Bangkok Shutdown Day, and it occurred right here at the Bangkok Post:
Unusually smooth Monday traffic
Isn't that beautiful?
Every other mega-city trumpets headlines when the traffic is cripplingly bad. Bumper-to-bumper on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sydney's CBD at a standstill. Athens gridlocked again.
Not here in Bangkok. It's headlines when it's not jammed!
(The headline appeared on the same day the Bangkok Post had ''No one hurt in Pattani bomb blast'' as well as ''No cabinet meeting today''. What a day ... truly a journalist's worst nightmare.)
I was in the middle of it that day, spending eight hours at Ratchaprasong, a little speck among what must have been 100,000 people.
''See! I told you! He's a Suthep supporter!'' angrily scream half my readers, or the ''haters'' as Miley Cyrus loves to call them, as I would too, only I hate Miley Cyrus.
Relax, my scarlet brethren. No need to hate on me. I remain firmly in the middle, straddling the red shirts and the Suthep supporters like an ageing Patpong prostitute over an obese Australian sex tourist.
I was at Ratchaprasong rescuing tourists if you must know, which I explained last week, but the fact I must hurry to explain myself reveals a lot about the current climate in Thailand.
You are either one of them, or one of us, depending on whether you have a whistle in your mouth or a red shirt on your back.
Don't even try to straddle the two, as that Patpong lass and myself have been trying to do. That's even worse.
There is a new group of people in the Thai political landscape who are being scorned. They are neither red nor Suthep supporters. They are called ''Thai-choei'' and their name is mud.
The word choei in Thai means not displaying any emotion. Not taking sides. Sitting on the fence.
That gives you an idea of the polarising times we are now in. You have to be red, or anti-red, but god help you if you choose not to take one of the sides.
I discovered this myself that day at Ratchaprasong.
Thanks to a friend of mine who is as addicted to Facebook as I was to Benson & Hedges in my early twenties, I was alerted to a couple of pictures uploaded featuring myself and various pro-Suthep supporters, taken as I escorted my Australian friends out of the protest zone at Ratchaprasong.
''Do you think it's such a good idea for you to be out among the protestors?'' a well-meaning Facebook friend whom I can't remember meeting messaged me. ''We Thais know you as an English teacher, and remember, half your students are red shirts.''
I would hazard a guess and say more than half, if voting trends are anything to go by. What ... so they are all suddenly going to ditch me? Or worse, switch from English studies to Chinese?
Another friend sent me a link where a group of people were saying rather unkind things about your columnist thanks to my perceived Democrat leanings, including an attached photograph of ... gasp ... me and Chuan Leekpai!
I am flattered total strangers would spend so much time trolling the net, skipping over photographs of me and Yingluck, to find damning pictorial evidence to support their claims (and thank god they never got to the really bad ones, such as the one in a Phuket nightclub accompanied by a swizzle stick and a lampshade), but that is not the point. The point, rather, is this: Never in my 25 years in Thailand have I seen this country so politically polarised.
You have to put it in perspective. In the pre-Thaksin era we couldn't tell political parties apart, thanks to pollies switching sides faster than a frantic game of Red Rover, depending on where the money and power was.
We had a cluster of political parties with names so interchangeable and transient that as a journalist it was a headache to remember them all.
It would be the equivalent of, say, Australia having parties with the following names: Develop Australia Party, which would turn into the Australia Party, while the Advance Australia Party would turn into the Australians Love Australians which would merge with the Australia Progress Party to become the Forward Australia Party.
Party policy? It didn't exist. Elections were exercises in musical chairs to see which parties could form coalitions to win power, so that the process of recouping one's losses from the elections could get under way.
It got so bad that at the turn of the century a new constitution forced politicians to belong to political parties 90 days prior to an election. Ninety whole days! You can imagine how much the pollies howled over that requirement.
It took Thaksin Shinawatra through his actions to polarise this nation, or rather, separate Thais into two groups, resulting in the two opposing sides that we see today, namely, the red shirts and the rest.
(The red shirts have, in the past two weeks, attempted to switch their colour to white. Can we universally ignore this please? It's terrible news for those of us continually culling the variety of shirts able to be worn to remain neutral.)
Perhaps, out of all this mess we are in now, things will settle down and Thais will learn that it's okay to work and live alongside people of opposing political beliefs without having to throw bombs at them.
For Thailand it will be a struggle but it isn't unthinkable.
It had to have been two decades ago when a youthful Alongkorn Ponlaboot, deputy leader of the Democrat Party, was in a relationship with Khomkhai Pollabutra, a member of Chart Thai.
Chart Thai and the Democrats were very much opposing factions, and it was so out of place that these two got a great deal of press from lifestyle magazines simply because they were an item despite being on opposite sides.
It didn't last long; Khomkhai defected to the Democrats, and later the two divorced, and the whole country breathed a sigh of relief.
One day we will look at Alongkorn and Khomkhai as political pioneers, or perhaps social pioneers, the first highly visible couple who could conduct a relationship despite being opposites on the political spectrum.
I worry that the current political situation in Thailand can only end in tears in the short term. We are going to have blood, bombs and bullets littering our streets, especially if the election goes ahead.
But what of the long run? Isn't what we are experiencing now kind of normal for countries in the midst of social upheaval?
I remain optimistic. I think it is necessary for this country to go through this troubled period in the hope that when things settled down, we finally have two sides that are clearly defined and we are okay with that.
The variable that will ensure a more stable future is the ability of Thais to adjust themselves to accept friends, relatives and partners even if they don't hold the same political beliefs.
It's not just a hope. It's imperative we reach that stage. The only other alternative is civil war, and that is something I wouldn't even wish on Miley Cyrus, let alone my worst enemy.
