I’m sure y’all have heard about the unrest in Thailand including the shutdown of Bangkok’s two airports. I have only one comment on a paragraph in a CNN article that stuck out to me as blatantly wrong, having lived in Thailand for eight months:
In Chiang Mai late Wednesday protesters wearing yellow shirts pulled a 60-year-old man from his car and shot and killed him, Reuters journalist John Sanlin told CNN. Anti-government protesters typically wear yellow shirts, he said.
Yellow is the King’s color. The King has always kept above the fray of politics and coups and is the one person that everyone in Thailand loves. Everyone (including us foreigners) would always wear yellow shirts on Monday (the King’s birthday). On a given day (let alone Monday), it seems 25% of the men in Chiang Mai, Thailand wear a yellow polo shirt with the King’s shield/crest on the left breast pocket. For the Reuters reporter John Sanlin to say that anti-government protesters wear yellow is akin to saying that anti-government protesters tend to have legs. On top of this, both political sides sides wear yellow to show that their actions are patriotic–according to this travel blog, the soldiers that participated in the latest coup tied yellow ribbons to their gun barrels. It’s the equivalent of American politicians wearing flag pins.
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