News and photos of local authorities ramping up patrols and inspections at Phuket Airport and in Patong have been a welcome reassurance for tourists and operators hyped up for the high-season.
With the Bangkok Erawan shrine bombing still fresh in memory, the Thai populace – including many of us from abroad who call Thailand home – took little convincing of the seriousness of the recharged threat.
Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Gen Prawit Wongsuwan in a meeting on Monday (Nov 23) assured the Kingdom’s top American envoy, Glyn Davies, that Thailand would be pulling out all the stops to ensure maximum security cooperation in the run-up to a busy year’s end.
It’s now safe to say that the “us versus them” mentality has leached beyond the borders of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Europe and the US, and is now spreading rapidly throughout the rest of the world, and right here in Phuket.
It would seem we’re at the point of no return as power brokers who fuel this everlasting war put pressure and expectations on their allies to proactively react to the ever-elusive threat of terror.
Like previous World Wars, a common threat and enemy has been conceived. But like common threats before, this one can be defeated, they tell us, if we unite and join the fight…
And though terror attacks will continue to take innocent lives as the war escalates, consider this plain and quantifiable fact: Terrorism is not the biggest threat to Phuket, or the world for that matter.
The world’s deadliest enemy can be harboured within all of us and takes more innocent lives than any extremist could ever dream of. Indeed, the lethal combination of ignorance, complacency and arrogance ensures that more residents and tourists will continue to die and get mangled in traffic accidents, or any one of a number of human-error disasters that could – but won’t likely – be prevented.
Choose your battles wisely.