I had two very different interactions online this morning about "Lockdown" and I've been pondering both of them for hours. Why? Because in Thailand, in my Thai and business circles, we almost never use that actual term.
Lockdown. Locally, here in Chang Mai, people mostly use the terms "Stay At Home" and "Work From Home", both reflecting a whole different underlying vibe of community and shared commitment to a greater good. When they're talking rules and whatnot, most Thai people refer to them as "Covid Restrictions" and "Covid Closures". Yes, they are imposed by a military government that few people currently approve of. Indeed, we have almost daily anti-government demonstrations, many of them violent, and a C**p is widely tipped. And yet STILL the daily language I hear doesn't reflect the sense of hard-done-by-ness that I picked up from the first interaction today.
My formerly Thai-dwelling, now Australian-residing Australian friend posted this:
Not just lockdown, but Hard Lockdown.
Now my half-a-lifetime living in Melbourne means I have LOADS of friends and family experiencing those same "hard" conditions. Just how brutal are they? An hour a day outside for walking and exercise. The luxury of shopping. Social bubbles and the ability to physically be with others. Exemptions for many types of employment. Delivery services. Access to vaccines if you choose them. Sweet Goddess Forbid, even the option to NOT wear a mask because it stresses you. And social services, pensions, unemployment benefits and stimulus packages.
Contrast that with my Hive blogging buddy @Gooddream who has just entered REAL lockdown in Vietnam this week.
gooddream81MEMBER ~ ASEAN HIVE VIP - GOLD2 hours ago
oh i didn't address your main question. We can not get food delivered and were meant to stock up. If you didn't stock up I suppose you are just going to have to eat whatever people will give you. Read his post here
A few days later, despite being shut in an apartment building with no exercise outside the building options with his little dog, he retains his optimism:
I say day 4 of 7 in a hopeful manner because the way things have been here lately it's tough to tell what the government is going to decide to do next. Just like they were with other lockdowns or restrictions they have a tendency to get extended and I have my beliefs that this will always be the case until the world admits that the complete eradication of a virus isn't possible no matter how much you keep people apart. I'll leave that discussion to the angry people on FB though.
Anyhow, our time here has been pretty great and Nadi spends most of her day on our new balcony, which is something we didn't have at our old place. Total lockdown day 4 of 7
The mindsets are poles apart. In Vietnam, as in Thailand, "work from home" is a luxury for the 5%. Internet services are as dodgy as the electric when rainy season storms roll through. Life IS brutal in so many ways, whether you are in a Food Queue trying to get enough for your family to eat for that day, or whether you (like me) are 15 months down the road of online schooling whilst scratching out enough of a living to keep food on the table. In the last 15 months, I think Ploi has been physically in a classroom for not more than 10 weeks. I have no respite, no assistance and no relief, and neither does she. It's certainly not ideal for any final year high school student trying to contemplate a future course of study which would involve overseas travel. Nor is it ideal for her single entrepreneurial mama, who feels like one more plastic zoom meeting might send her completely over the edge.
And yet there is no obvious trace of hard-done-by-ness here in my immediate Thai world. No one likes it, but people are just getting on.
If anything, there's a sense of it being something that's happening everywhere, an underlying comradeship, a working together to get through it, and a sense of Su Su (which is Thai for "stay strong"). Comradeship is an interesting choice of word, no? In a socialized military dictatorship. But I digress. Shared humanity prevails and there are more social media shares about generosity and What Can I Do to Help? than there are overt complaints.
People, even Thai people, have wildly divergent opinions here about the vaxx programs and whether the restrictions actually help. And yet, mostly, they get on with doing whatever it is that they can to collectively move forward.
Pondering my friend's perception of "hard lockdown" and 
And so I have decided to consciously choose to use the terms "Work from home" and "Covid restrictions" instead of "Lockdown". Because calling it "Lockdown" gives all my personal sovereignty away and draws me into a victim-blame scenario which is spectacularly unhelpful, depressing and self-defeating.
Do I AGREE with Work from Home? Heck no. My personal take is to simply open everything, globally, and let everyone take personal responsibility for their own natural health. Yup - I am utterly & unashamedly Dutch that way. 😆 So the vulnerable ones could die? I'm ok with that. THEY could and should socially distance and accept the natural consequences. The rest of us need to get on with living differently and more healthfully. Overweight, high blood pressure and heart disease? Take better care of yourself please.
But my personal viewpoint matters little in a wider social and global structure. In the end, the greater good is better served by optimism than gloom, even when the Stay A Home orders aren't well founded in science or immunology. I do the minimum to be obviously legal and not arrested. I still hug people. I pull my mask up when people approach and am seen to have one on when required. That's it. I still meet people for coffee and allow my daughter to hang out at her friends' houses. I don't believe in Covid tests or the whole vaxx regime, but my personal freedom to travel may mean that I have to compromise that, if I can't find a grey vaxx passport option.
Ultimately, my personal choice to be optimistic changes more in life than the need to blame, count the days or view everything as something done personally unto me.
I've decided that I believe in democracy more than most western people I know. And by that I mean when I am on the 49% losing team, I definitely don't concede my personal values, but I stop working actively & publicly against the decisions I disagree with. And I try to find a way to live positively and constructively within the frameworks that other people believe will take society forward. In practice, it means I largely withdraw from mainstream society, and that feels OK.
I'm happily watching the whole vaxx mandate thing collapse as data is gathered and the risks being exposed. I've never had a flu vaxx, EVER, and I hope to avoid this Covid vaxx requirement if I can.
But mostly I'm disconnecting from a negative narrative which has taken over our society, and putting my time into working on positive things that I can control: my natural products business, putting great information into the public arena that empowers people, and connecting with the changemakers and the leaders in my world.
Bracing for a barrage of comments 🤣 and feeling better about the dichotomies in my world for having examined and shared them.
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