I'm happy to see that the Vancouver media is finally clueing in that something is going on here. Today on the VancouverSun website there is finally an indication that the people in the West are beginning to take things seriously.

There is an excellent gallery with English captions here .

Most of the photos are from the live fire zone near my house (Ding Daeng). One thing that becomes very clear through the photographs is the "war weapons" that the Reds are apparently using. I'm not sure but I've never heard of a war being fought with slingshots, fireworks and homemade petrol bombs. It brings to light the type of rhetoric and alarmist language being used by the government and the media. This only hightens tension and makes the situation worse. How many photos are of Red who have been shot? I'd like to see how many of the 35 dead in the last few days were killed by military issue rifles and how many were killed by the Red's "war weapons". Now, I'm once again not saying that the Reds don't have guns. Of course they do but I do not think it's to the level that the media and the government is reporting. If they had guns then why would they be shooting fireworks at armed troops?

For me the photo of the soldier peering out from the sandbag barricades says a lot. That is not the face of a seasoned soldier. It's the face of a young man, he's probably no older that 18 and he is probably not in the army of his own free will. Instead he's probably one of the thousands of young men serving their mandatory military time and has found himself in a situation where he is being asked to fire on his own people.

The last 48 hours have affected me greatly. I've been forced to reconsider how I feel about revolution, about violence. I've always been a strong supporter of revolutions, of people fighting for their rights. I've also stated numerous times (sometimes right here on my blog) that in times of revolution violence is sometimes needed to elicit change. However, having spent the last three days watching Thai people kill each other on TV, watching unarmed citizens being shot in the streets, watching protesters pull soldiers out of humvees and beat them unconscious, watching women and children and the elder literally fleeing for their lives, I'm forced to question what it is accomplishing.

Until you are put face to face with the reality of violent revolution it's very easy to romanticize it; to shake your fist in the air and herald killing for a cause but I've found that as I watch people slaughtering each other on TV and then look out my window and see the smoke rising from the exact same place that I'm watching on TV, it all seems so crazy. Humans have the capacity to accomplish the most amazing things yet we choose to demean our collective intelligence by killing each other over something that could be solved if we could just sit down and talk about it reasonably.  Neither side in this dispute is acting responsibly. My heart still rests firmly with the Reds but I've had my fill of killing. My heart is breaking with every moment that passes.

J