From March through May, Bangkok, Thailand was victim to intense political unrest, involving skirmishes between anti-government “Redshirt” protesters (UDD), Royal Thai Army soldiers, Bangkok riot police, and third-party elements scattered all around the city.

It had lasted two months but thankfully been fairly isolated in other parts of the city, but in the last few days, for the second year in a row, the clashes very suddenly focused right on Thanon Ratchewithi, the main road that I walk along every day to get to Bangkok’s public transit, the BTS Skytrain.

Friday, May 14th. Everything up until this point in our neighborhood had been fairly quiet. Early afternoon, my girlfriend and I parted ways—she had to do some business errands at the bank and the post office and head to her apartment 5 minutes up the boulevard from me.

Two hours later, I get a phone call. “Someone’s shooting right outside my condo. I can see people running up the street. We’re stuck inside the building, they say it’s not safe to go downstairs.”

Not long after, worried sick about Nikki and her roommate getting stuck in their tower for days (and the potential of losing power, water, etc.) I wandered out with Sean to see what there was to see right at the end of our soi. Demonstrators were subtly provoking the soldiers, who were slowly advancing up the street in our direction. They had blocked off the road to traffic, but there were a few locals trickling out of the sealed-off area, so I was sizing up the situation to see if I could get to them… I was wondering whether there was a back entrance to their property if I went down Soi 1 and climbed the fence…

As Sean and I were getting ready to head back home to safety though, in our last moments of stupid curiosity a few loud shots fired in our direction and we frantically ran for cover with the crowd of onlookers, dodging behind a small pickup truck as the adrenaline started pumping. Just another day in Bangkok, I started off dodging bullets with Sean Ogle, but our neighborhood then fell under siege for the next six+ days.

Looking up Ratchaprarop Road about 300 meters from Nikki’s condo before everything went to hell. (Photo by Sean Ogle)

A protester prepares to hurl a Molotov cocktail up the street from me. (Athit Perawongmetha/Getty Images)

A burning tire rolls toward the line of Thai soldiers moving to disperse Red Shirt protesters on Friday, May 14, 2010 in Bangkok, Thailand. (AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn)

Red Shirt protesters create a burning barricade on Rama IV road to stop army soldiers from advancing in Bangkok May 15, 2010. (REUTERS/Adrees Latif)

A Thai man believed to be a Red Shirt demonstrator lies dead in the street after being shot by an unidentified sniper Saturday, May 15, 2010, in Bangkok, Thailand. (AP Photo)

A Thai man removes a can from a burning barricade in a main avenue of Bangkok during clashes between demonstrators and security forces on May 16, 2010. (PEDRO UGARTE/AFP/Getty Images)

Anti-government protesters carry a man who was shot by live ammunition during clashes between demonstrators and security forces in Bangkok on May 16, 2010. (NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images)

This is literally 200 meters away from my door, at the end of my soi in Victory Monument. Bangkok on May 16, 2010: a war zone. (Athit Perawongmetha/Getty Images)

Thick black smoke billows through the air behind the main Chulalongkorn hospital near the Red Shirt encampment on Wednesday May 19, 2010 in Bangkok, Thailand. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

An armored personnel carrier moves toward a burning anti-government barricade during a military crackdown Wednesday, May 19, 2010, in Bangkok, Thailand. (AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn)

An anti-government protester piles tires on a fire at a shopping center Wednesday, May 19, 2010, in Bangkok, Thailand. (AP Photo/Wally Santana)

A statue and a torn Thai national flag remain in front of Bangkok’s Central World shopping mall, which was gutted by fire after army soldiers advanced towards an encampment of thousands of Red Shirt protesters, May 19, 2010. (REUTERS/Adrees Latif)

Friday night, I watched right outside my window as rioters dragged heaps of sheet metal, scraps, and rods onto my soi to build a makeshift road blockade, watched them throwing Molotov cocktails over my neighbors’ roofs at the police and Army at 4 in the morning. Rubber bullets were flying, tear gas is in the air, and homemade explosives were going off all through the night, grenades being launched in the air, gunfire, and numerous reports (via Twitter) of unidentified snipers on rooftops throughout our neighborhood shooting at protesters, soldiers, and even uninvolved onlookers.

This is the scene that unfolded literally right outside Nikki’s front door on Saturday morning, May 15th—Thanon Ratchaprarop became one of the two main “Live Fire Zones” where soldiers were shooting on sight. Protesters created a tire barricade 15 meters up Nikki’s condo driveway, and at least two or three protesters and bystanders were shot and killed. Their bodies were dragged inside her lobby where a doctor (or a paramedic?) was trying to tend to them. There is also video taken from above by some other residents in her building, from one of the upper floors of The Complete Ratchaprarop condominium. That bursting loud gunfire sound echoed throughout our entire neighborhood all day and all night.

Nikki called me at 10:30 Saturday morning. Needless to say, it had been a rough night to try to sleep.… and I missed the call since I’d only finally passed out three hours earlier. Her third attempt woke me: finally, after she’d been trapped inside for about 24 hours, she had been evacuated from her building by soldiers, guided out the back of the condominium, through an adjoining garden park, and had to use a ladder to get over the back wall.

Without hesitation, I packed a bag in about 10 minutes, taking all my most important items I couldn’t stand not to ever see again. Several of the buildings on our road were torched, as you can see from some of the photos above. Rioters set about 35 major fires around the city, and Asia’s second-largest shopping mall, Central World, was completely destroyed.

Thankfully, we were finally able to meet and get out of the city safely. We took a bus headed to Kanchanaburi, a small countryside town about two hours northwest of Bangkok, to stay alongside the River Kwai for a few days. There were plenty of places in Bangkok that were left untouched, and on some streets life went on like normal and you almost wouldn’t have any idea anything was wrong, but we found ourselves right in the center of the worst of it, so we spent the next four weeks away from home.

But even for the first week well away from harm, I was concerned for the safety of many of my friends who live in my building, or up the street from me, including (you can read their accounts of the events too) Sean Ogle, Dwight Turner, Mark Weins, Jodi Ettenberg, my friends May, Joel, and others…

All around Bangkok, protesters and rioters sacked shops and malls, torched electricity companies, municipal services buildings, the Thai Stock Exchange, provincial halls in areas outside of Bangkok, they shot at firefighters trying to put out fires in Siam, attacked TV stations and newspaper headquarters. After days of rioting, torching, and clashes with Army troops, much of my neighborhood, Victory Monument, Rajavithi Road and Din Daeng intersection in Bangkok, were reduced to rubble.

Peaceful demonstrations and violent uprisings

Our universe revolves around a cycle of creation—life is created and fades, energy is formed and consumed…

In my mind, as human actors in this reality, we have three modes of interaction with this system: production, consumption, and destruction. We create offspring, we distill and consume energy, we produce and consume things of value. Sometimes, we destroy life, or we destroy things of value, so that they are of no use to us or to anyone else.

War is destruction. Don’t let politicians fool you into believing war is about freedom. You don’t need to wage war on another society to become free, or to protect your freedom. Sometimes it is about securing resources for one nation’s future consumption, to someone else’ detriment (like all the US’ wars in the Middle East), but usually it is nothing but destruction.

I don’t condone governments that wage illegal wars. I don’t like seeing soldiers in the streets shooting people. I find all the “collateral damage” of conflict that lasts for decades despicable—the adverse effects on families and societies, the mines that kill and maim children thirty years later in places like Vietnam and Cambodia, for example.

But anti-establishment, anti-government movements are destructive too. They rise out of an opposition to injustice, or opposed to something they see as unethical, which are valid and good motivations. But all too often these groups—even the most organized forms of counterculture movements like Marxism and communism—tend to become as corrupt as the regimes they originally opposed. They use violence and destruction as a means to overthrow the existing systems and institutions.

“What is the point of anyone feeling proud of being the winner, when standing on a pile of ruins and rubble?” –King Rama IX of Thailand

As an aside: I am a capitalist, and until I find a better solution, I think I always will be. The capitalist free market is about both production and consumption. Businesses and entrepreneurs must create value—things and ideas of value—for others to consume. Yes, there are thousands of unethical businesspeople and corporations out there, but ethical entrepreneurs and corporations capitalize on whatever situation they find themselves in in the most effective way they can without causing hardship to those around them—in order to create the best possible outcome from their situation—creating jobs, income, products, services, and new ideas and solutions for problems that society faces.

In the last few months, there has been an interesting discussion unfolding in the online personal development and lifestyle design communities (see here and here, including the comments) about the merits (or lack thereof) of consumerism, pitting capitalist thinkers against anti-capitalist thinkers. But I don’t believe that solutions to the world’s problems—hunger, disease, poverty, war—are mutually exclusive from capitalism. Yes, we need to strive for a more ethical lifestyle design movement for example, and yes, the world deserves more ethical business. Definitely. But a radical abandoning of capitalism in favor of a radical leftist movement isn’t the answer. Anti-consumerism and anti-corporate attitudes aren’t really the answer, and in fact, while I agree with much of what my colleagues who hold those beliefs say, I think going too far down that road is dangerous.

The only way to create true positive change in the world is to find unconventional ways to work within the system, and change it from the inside out. You don’t create long-lasting positive progress with uprisings, by forcefully casting down the existing system, violently overthrowing the ruling elite, or the incumbent institutions. Once you spill blood, you forfeit your credibility entirely.

We are all participating in our own constructed fantasies, and none of us realize it. We are all trapped in prisons we cannot see.

Like Eric Schiller said in his recent critique of the lifestyle design and personal development communities, “the problem is not that we are participating in a fantasy, but the fact that we do not realize it is one.” We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Yes, I have my fantasies, and you have yours. But we need to take off the Che Guevara t-shirts. We need to stop idolizing the mythical “freedom fighters” without fully understanding the details of their lives. (Seriously, read about El Che and all the violent acts he committed before you put on that t-shirt again.) Rejecting consumerism and saying “fuck the system” like you’re Tyler Durden seems cool and trendy, until it leads to running around in ski masks blowing up Starbucks shops and financial buildings.

The protests in Thailand were largely bankrolled by someone very rich and very powerful, and I watched as these people were fed a certain story by protest leaders shouting propaganda over the radio every night for two months. I’m all for peaceful demonstrations, but you either stick to your principles or you don’t, and there’s a big difference when you incite an angry mob to violence. This was more like brainwashing, to the point that it became normal and acceptable to these people to come to Bangkok and destroy people’s businesses and homes, put their own children in harm’s way, kill their own countrymen in the street, and go back home to sleep in their own beds. (Please note: I don’t really support any side here, not the Redshirts, the Yellowshirts, the Army, or anyone. Everyone has some responsibility to take and I just hate seeing people killing each other.)

There is definitely a place for real heroism in the world, but we need to stop painting ourselves in the role of David against Goliath. Governments and people in positions of power use these types of stories to breed nationalism, racism, and hate, and pit us against each other. But if we believe these stories, we end up fighting each other in the street. Instead we must see reality for what it is, and stop believing these myths that it is “us” against “them”, “good” versus “evil”, that we are in some epic battle against injustice which justifies any means to an end.

Society has steeped itself in myths and ideologies about heroism and the fight for what is “right” for millenia—you see it in our stories, in our comic books, in our movies, you see it on television. It’s the reason why the US has occupied Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly a decade. It’s the reason why Christians, Jews, and Muslims continue to murder each other every day.

But the only way to peace and prosperity for everyone is through nonviolence, through rationality, and through conversation.

After being there in the middle of a so-called “people’s uprising” for two consecutive years—a socially- and economically-fueled revolt against the “system”, against the elite, against the people who pull the strings—all I can say is I don’t want any part of it. These things happen all the time, all around the world (we’re pretty sheltered in America). There certainly are important disparities and inequalities that need to be examined and resolved, but we must not sink to the same level of corruption and violence to solve the injustices in the world.

We must embrace rationality. This needs to happen at every level of society, all the way down to you and me. For lifestyle designers, personal development bloggers, and online marketers like us, perhaps we need to reexamine the language we use. We need to stop calling ourselves “radicals” and “revolutionaries” when we’re really not. We need to stop reinforcing the myths of “revolt against the system”. Because I think if you step back and ask yourself if you would truly want to be a part of a real revolution in the streets, I think your answer would be “no”.

We must destroy our idols. We mustn’t make our lives about what we are against, but make them all about what we are for. Whether you’re for liberating people from the cubicle, saving the environment, helping the oppressed and disadvantaged, or otherwise making the world a better place, we need to band together and focus not on destroying what we don’t like but on producing. On creating alternate solutions.

Photo sources:

• Protests turn deadly in Thailand – The Big Picture – Boston.com
• Crackdown in Bangkok – The Big Picture – Boston.com
• Bangkok Street Fighting Intensifies – Photo Essays – TIME
• Terror in Thailand – Photo Gallery – LIFE