God Bless the Child

Mama may have

And Papa may have

But God bless the child

Who's got his own

Who's got his own.

Anyway, that's what Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr. wrote in 1941. But, of course, for the vast majority of people in the world today – and certainly the majority of those who live in Thailand – Mama doesn't have and Papa doesn't have, and their mama and papa didn't have, either.

And a whole layer of people at the top of society would be just as happy to make sure that the child doesn't have, too.  The haves and the have-nots are engaged in one of the world's most prevalent dynamics, and it's seen with special clarity in those countries where the gap between the two is glaringly visible.  The Rolls-Royces and the palaces over here; the water buffalo and the sagging shack, or the begging bowl, over there.

The invisible walls that keep the poor in their hovels are based on the immensely resilient fallacy that an economy is a zero-sum game -- that if a million peasants, to oversimplify, are given one dollar each, that represents a million dollars snatched from the grasp of the rich -- or, at least, a million the rich can't gather up and salt away in Switzerland.

Most economists would argue that keeping the majority of people in a society poor and ignorant actually limits how rich the rich can get, especially in a corrupt country.  And while there are lots of reasons why economics is called "the dismal science," it makes sense to believe that, as the poor prosper and pay more taxes and consume more goods, the profits and the benefits flow largely where they've always flowed -- into the pockets of the rich and powerful.  

It is very difficult to find photos of the Thai rich looking rich - they're too smart for that.  So we're using this photo of a middle-class couple in a fancy Bangkok restaurant, although they'd look plenty rich to the little Isaan girl above.  There are only two ways she's ever likely to be in a place like this: she's a waitress (not probable at all -- those jobs go to the daughters of people who know someone) or she becomes a prostitute and is taken there by a customer.

It's not fair to tar Thailand with the brush that should be reserved for such thuggish regimes as Myanmar and the worker's paradise of Kim Jong Il.  Literacy is nearly 100% in Thailand (higher than in the US) and free education is available to all, even if most poor kids drop out of school to support their families.  Every adult has a vote to cast (or sell), and new millionaires and professionals do emerge from the shanties from time to time.  Still, the walls are high and topped with broken glass.  And that, of course, is at the root of the problem that brought the Red Shirts to the streets of Bangkok.

When you look at the little girl above, or at the beautifully dignified older man to the right, still dressed for the village but washed up on the sidewalk of Bangkok with nothing but a bag and a bowl, you want to do something, anything, to make life easier and more fair for them.   But what?

The quick fix doesn't look any more likely when you realize that Billie Holliday based her song on a verse of the New Testament that was old when the book was assembled, probably in the 4th century, AD.  It's from Matthew, verses 25:29:

For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.  


The rich get richer, in other words, and the poor get poorer.

Tim -- Sundays