While reading Thai Enquirer’s articles last week about donation culture, I thought back to a meme that I saw a couple months ago by @bougiebangkokgirl. The meme featured an Elmo with the label “bkk_person1” smushing its face into a pile of ทำบุญ (tum boon) while looking away from another pile labelled “anything that tackles structural inequality.”
While meant to be satirical, this meme does elucidate the fact that in many ways, Thailand’s obsession with tum boon has prevented our society from addressing the systemic issues that exists within our society and culture.
Tum boon (lit. making merit) is a Buddhist concept that pervades through all aspects of Thai society. It not only includes giving alms to monks, but also, donations or serving our community in general.
Of course, tum boon culture has its place in Thai society.
Because of this culture, we were able to quickly gather donations, supplies, and volunteers, during countless disasters, such as the floods of the central region of 2011 and the tsunami of 2004. However, the over-reliance on tum boon culture to solve our problems prevents us from discussing the systemic inequalities that resulted in these problems in the first place.
One example is our approach to Thailand’s healthcare system.
Back in 2019, Artiwara (P’ Toon Bodyslam) Kongmalai started a fundraiser to raise money for struggling, under-resourced hospitals in the rural areas by running from the South to the North of Thailand. Even though it was extremely selfless for P’ Toon to raise these funds, it should not be his job, or the job of any private citizen, for that matter, to raise funds to keep public institutions alive.
The government should have allocated taxpayer money into these institutions to ensure that taxes actually return to serve the population. Instead, at the time, Thailand’s military dictatorship was funneling taxpayer money to buy more tanks and weapons, while preventing these funds from reaching institutions crucial to the survival of the general population, such as healthcare and education. If the government keeps denying these funds from reaching these institutions, should we have another celebrity host another run? If we keep having to have grassroots organization support these necessary public institutions while the central government wastes our money, how will we ever sustainably solve the issues in our society?
Throughout the years, there are countless examples of how the central government has exploited this culture to their own advantage. We are seeing this play out again. Last week, the government has asked the 20 richest Thais to come help the government fight against the outbreak. This sets a dangerous precedent for future situations, allowing the government to ask for donations instead of addressing the root cause of these issues.
Instead of using donations to treat the symptoms of these underlying inequalities in the short term, the government should take the time to address the systemic diseases affecting our society. It should work to tackle the numerous sources of inequality in our society, such as between social classes, genders, and urban and rural settings. Without doing so, the government will never be able to find long term, sustainable solutions to the various issues that plague our country.
As the COVID wave starts to die down, we need to start addressing these topics. New crises will inevitably arise in the future, and again, will allow the underlying issues of classism, sexism, and other systemic inequalities to resurface in other forms. It is time that we ask ourselves: are we going to be the type of society that will continue to let the government exploit our tumboon culture to quickly slap on a band-aid for these problems? Or are we going to be the type of society that seeks to address systemic inequality that pervades through our nation and resolve them once and for all?
