"It's Not My Problem" (Activism & Vegans in Chiang Mai)

yo what's up this video is going to
contain some reflections on the problem of people saying it's not my problem which is something you're going to deal with again and again in making the case for any form of political activism any form of social movement strolling for any kind of positive change obviously here I have a special interest in veganism in ecology but this video also has some non-random reflections on my life here in Chiang Mai Thailand I'm here for just a few days on my way from Canada up to China for those who don't know don't watch my channel I just mentioned that in passing when I first started talking about Thailand on youtube I think over 1 year ago I was addressing the kind of strange mix of myths hype and over-the-top expectations the people had for this city for Chiang Mai Thailand and you know contrasting it to my own experience in the region now again I don't want to launch into an autobiography here but I have diverse experience doing historical research humanitarian research language research living working and learning in this part of Asia including Chiang Mai but all of northern Thailand Cambodia Laos you nan I have some comparative sense of what life is like in different places in the region and also I have a sense of the kind of pressing ecological moral and political concerns that i would hope my fellow vegans would at least take some passing interest in so i talked about this as i said some like a year ago i got i got a lot of fan mail and i got a little bit of hate mail for those videos he does be surprised I mean there was a lot of positive reactions was appreciative reaction to what I had to say about Thailand in the past including from people who had no interest in veganism who had no prior familiarity with my channel but who just realized i was offering something real some kind of honest contribution and contrasting you know some of the overhyped expectations of tourists and people who are on a zeiss a permanent vacation to you know what you can really expect in reality now one of the messages i got that was maybe a closer to two hate mail as I recall was from an old man here I presume was vegan I don't really know but an old man who was in the cycling scene and I just mentioned earlier there are plenty of athletes here who are not vegan there are plenty of people here on permanent vacation were not vegan you know there every combination as possible uh but this guy wrote to me and he was the one person who really took the diametric opposite view to mine because you know a lot of people react and say well i agree with you up to a point but on the other hand life is just about having fun so why should we worry about poverty prostitution the fact that the democratic government was replaced with the military dictatorship the fact that the city is literally falling to pieces here in Chiang Mai that you know like the sidewalk is crumbling under your feet that every time it rains even in the wealthiest neighborhood the street is underwater due to bed infrastructure bad public planning etc you know the failures of good government are very obvious if you're here and you have your eyes open you know and why beyond that of course why should we care about ecology deforestation malaria dengue fever or anything else that reminds you social reality why should we be concerned about you know the fate of the elephant's the wild elephants going extinct the wild tiger is going to take anything that might spark your interest as a vegan are just as an intelligent human being living in this part of the world there's one guy he was the one guy who really wrote to me a hundred eighty degrees opposite where he said no he didn't accept the notion that people should feel any responsibility for anything here he felt the people here really should just buy a bicycle get on strava Travis a website for exercise enthusiasts and live this life of self-indulgence of permanent vacation happy that that was really all there was to it and I remember he said even though it was just kind of one sense it stuck with me he said and so what if the local people are are living in poverty that's not our problem it's not our fault the darn property so therefore oh forget about it now I mean my own background in economics and political science shapes the way I see these things yeah both in a shallow sense and in a profound sense I was talking to one of my fellow vegans here online and he was remarking on how cheap Chiang Mai was now I I don't think Chiang Mai is cheap in several different senses under several different headings I don't think it's cheap compared to other cities with in Thailand for example I don't think it's cheap compared to other cities in Southeast Asia but also I'm thinking about the fact that it is not cheap for local people relative to local wages so you know I pointed out to him again it's not a it's not an angry disagreement or something it's just a different perspective it's just we just disagree and I pointed out to him look you know the minimum wage in london england is sorry yeah in London specifically in the city of london england is over nine pounds sterling per hour i think that works out to about 450 thai baht at the moment so 450 thai baht per hour here in thailand for local people the minute the minimum wage is about 300 baht per day not per hour per day so you know when trying to claim that life here is cheap you know i have a different framework a different set of concerns expectations etc and you know the word concern is actually the main thing i want to sell to you if the audience today within canada there are people born and raised in canada who look at you know poverty or other social problems and say this is not my fault this is not my problem therefore i'm just going to live a life of self-indulgence and you can look at people who live in toronto and look at the water pollution and even though they are literally drinking the polluted water they say this is not my fault this is not my problem even though they flush the toilet like everyone else they you know Trent water out of the tap me in many ways you know it literally physically chemically scientifically it is both your fault and it is your problem but nevertheless you know even with than like water pollution it's very difficult to deal with the attitude this is not my fault this is not my problem and in other cases you can say genuinely you can't you have to agree with people you know if you are basically a tourist in Thailand it's true poverty here social problems here ecology here is not your fault and it's not your problem but it could be your concern and I would say sincerely it should be your concern you you can't be concerned about everything everywhere you know I mean you can't uh you know if you if you are concerned with and engage with one place then by definition you got not engage another four years and years I lived out here so I was very concerned with human rights issues to use a broad term human rights issues in Thailand Laos and Cambodia I was not concerned with human rights issues in Afghanistan or Iraq now obviously during the same period of history there were enormous momentous events in Afghanistan and Iraq of political and otherwise um I could have devoted my life to that area i could have consumed myself with being concerned with and trying to make a positive difference of there I wasn't the combination of humanitarian work you know activism and just research that I wanted to do scholarship they wanted to do was located here and as I've mentioned you guys before when that ended I wanted to continue with the same kind of life of engagement of being politically concerned politically active but to switch theaters entirely from working on Southeast Asia to working on the indigenous people within Canada boy that one is really depressing if you talk to white people in Canada and you say look you know you're living next door to a humanitarian disaster there's an indigenous peoples community indigenous peoples reservation you know where the first nations are living in poverty and they have no drinking water and they have no access to medicine they have you know third world conditions we had a scandal of that kind recently in Canada the Attawapiskat scandal which you know attawapiskat his name of a town where they had these kind of worse than third world conditions and people literally living in tents and unlike here in Southeast Asia the climate is way too cold for people to survive the winter intense and you know tremendous breakdown of you know both private sector and public sector for that community and of course there are white people who will respond to that by saying it's not my fault and it's not my problem within Canada so you know the ethical arguments we make whether it's about your drinking water whether it's about your fellow citizens in your own country or if it's about citizens in a far-off distant land or in a country you have chosen to move to as a long-term tourists as a resident I think the main thing where we're having to do is shift from a mindset of fault to a mindset of positive concern I think it is childish to try to motivate someone to do the right thing by saying this is your fault this is your fault therefore this is your problem therefore you should be motivated to learn about it and to do something about it I think that's a schoolyard way of thinking and it stems from the childhood experience most of us have if you're a child and you drop something on the floor your parents will tell you you have to clean it up because it's your fault it's the fault based logic it is both natural and is to some extent inculcated into us at an early age I think the mature and adult attitude instead is to say you know not there's no question of whether or not this is my fault that's irrelevant like it is if you're a white person who leaves the United States of America it is actually irrelevant whether or not your ancestors owned slaves okay we're all in it together if you're living in America today it doesn't matter if your grandparents migrated to America from Lithuania and therefore you never owned slaves you were never part of that history you can't say the condition of black people is not my fault that is not my problem it's completely irrelevant right the reality of for instance the the Tamir rice shooting the police brutality the questions about the status of black people in that states america it's all of our concern it's all of our problem if we are Americans living in America I'm not I'm a Canadian living in couldn't Ming China but hey you know uh but the question is instead should this be your concern and then what can you do with that concern and look you know we all like to play this game of judgey not lest you be judged don't be judgemental don't be a jerk if if you're not concerned if you're refusing to take an interest that does reflect on you it does reflect badly on you and there is a moral judgment involved if you're someone who's chosen to live here in Chiang Mai Thailand for a year or two years or even for six months and you have no concern No engage in these issues I think you do have to ask yourself why and I think I'm in the right to ask you you know conversation between two people I have right to ask you why now maybe there is a good reason maybe you're a scientist researching cancer and all your time and energy goes into trying to find the cure for cancer I can sympathize I really can't maybe you know you're a veteran of the Iraq war and even though you retired to Thailand you spend all your time and energy keeping up with events in Iraq reading about writing about and maybe being involved with some charity connected to things happening right I completely sympathize situations like that happen but of course what we're really dealing with here in Chiang Mai 2016 instead are several different communities of people who have moved here to live lives with no sense of responsibility with no sense of engagement and you know they not only they of course they don't learn the Thai language but they don't open a newspaper they don't even have an interest in the fact that a democratic government has been replaced by a dictatorship let alone you know the other things that I've mentioned or you know maybe you have to walk halfway down the block to take a look at the conditions of elephants or Tigers line but there's so much here that obviously should be leaping out at vegans and they should be taking understand so I'm that's funny to me part of the fundamental challenge of veganism is pulling back the veil that obscures the reality of you know mass manufactured meat of the industrial production of animal products of saying to people look I want you to care enough till to see I want you to see what's unseen because you know there's a there's a veil this thin that's hiding from you you know the difference between the neatly packaged styrofoam container of beef sold as a final product and the unbelievable cycle of suffering waste and pollution that comes before that you know you know the antiseptic cleanliness of a leather jacket hanging in a shop or even a wool sweater you know it looks good it smells good it doesn't seem like you're buying something immoral or horrifying and the you know unbelievable process and you know including the ecologic consequence of that process just so you can wear a jacket that's made at a leather instead of a jacket made out of polyester some mouse um you're saying to people again and again I want you to care I want you to look harder I want you to see something that's slightly unseen so for me I think it's inevitable that we as vegans and just we as human beings ask one another to be concerned I've talked to vegans who've lived here and they've never seen the poverty and they don't see it because they're not looking I talked to a couple vegans who lived here who said they never saw the prostitution lived in Chiang Mai never saw the prostitution you must have your head in the sand I have no idea i mean you know hey look I know I'm gorgeous but the prostitutes will come out in the street and chase you down if you're a good-looking man you know it's not only is it not hidden it'll it'll come up and declare itself to you with reality prostitution in a city like this uh you know you know other problems you have to look for harder I've lived in small villages in Laos where deforestation and drug addiction were huge problems and yet you would meet foreigners you'd meet white Westerners who completely refuse to admit that any such problem existed there and you would have to say to them yeah I even met you know it's a longer story I won't include here I met white people who refuse to admit there was any malnutrition there was any starvation or food shortage in areas of Laos where I I knew for a fact there was from research and from my own humanitarian work at my engagement that you know there was regular seasonal starvation food shortage that we were dealing with and that the population that was dependent on handouts and so on and you'd meet white people would say you completely sell from no no you know no such problems this year well you know if you don't know how to look you know the drug addicts aren't going to come up to you and tell you their life story the people dying of AIDS I've done AIDS research hiv/aids research you know people dying of AIDS are not normally walking down the street holding a billboard saying I have AIDS I want your attention obviously they're hidden away whether it's in a in a hut or in a hospital bed you know finding out about about AIDS even in the middle of an epidemic because in Cambodia we did have an epidemic it's it's now in the past tense but you know AIDS and AIDS orphans and AIDS orphan looks the same as any other kid in a playground if you walk past a playground you can't just see how many kids have had their lives devastated by their parents dying of AIDS you gotta look you know and no it's not your fault it's not your problem but it should be your concern and if it's not as I say I've got to ask you why because for me is a vegan everyday with my friends my family etc when they put on that leather jacket it's the same thing I've got to ask them to see what's unseen and I've got to ask them why