I don’t know what to feel. When I first woke up this morning to a message saying the King had passed, I really did feel my heartbeat stopped and, after waking up my roommate to tell her the news, I really did feel like I wanted to cry. It was almost sadness, but it also felt like it wasn’t. It was fear for change too, and for the safety of my friends and family under a time of immense political instability and uncertainty, and it was just the weight of this being a huge event of where I call home and me not being there.
It was also the locally banned books I read and the classes I took and the “critical skills” I gained, telling me that maybe monarchy wasn’t the best system and we Thais lived under the best-planned and best-managed propaganda regime ever. Reading news from abroad, of how he was a “demigod” in our eyes, of how we never hear of his faults but always his goodwill projects. It was the memory of one of my first months living abroad, when a Swedish friend criticized her king and asked why we Thais loved our king so much, and I told her because he did so many good things, but couldn’t give more than a few examples when she asked me to name some. It was the realization that for most part of my life, I accepted something as truth a little too easily.
And now, thinking of why I would expect to know anything different when the "only trustworthy news source" of the royal family was the Bureau of the Royal Household itself. And doubting how much was true at all… And even then, still feeling like I want to cry and still feeling grief for he who had passed.
A spectacular hegemony, I heard in my head as I walked away from class still feeling sad and planning to change my Facebook profile to black.
The most successful mind washing project, I thought as I called my friends and agreed with them that Thailand is doomed without the King.
Don’t take me for one of the rest, a part of me whispered as I listened to one of the King’s anthems and felt a tear fall.
It may seem illogical to accept the outcomes of such a controlled and censored system, but is it fair to assume that the love and respect an entire nation of almost 70 million devotes to him is illegitimate or incorrectly justified? Maybe he was only the product of images twisted and turned so well that truth and lie can’t be distinguished, or maybe he was the best king the world has ever seen.
May he rest in peace.
