OPINION

12-hour backlash

Re: "Nurses oppose 12-hour shifts", (BP, March 23).

I applaud and fully sympathise with the nurses at Chiang Rai Prachanukroh hospital for protesting and rejecting the proposed forced 12-hour shifts.

The scatter-brained people at the Thailand Nursing and Midwifery Council try to impose this cruel system on already overworked, grossly underpaid, stressed nurses to cover up the dire shortages of nurses in state hospitals.

I challenge them, apparently many of them former nurses, to go and work 12-hour shifts, looking after a minimum of 10 patients, as stated by the statistics. It is sheer lunacy and amounts to modern-day slavery.

Stop abusing the nurses. Train more of them and pay them a decent salary so that they will not leave the profession, or go and work in private hospitals. I would worry to be a patient looked after by a tired, nay exhausted, nurse at the end of her 12-hour shift week.

Defining democracy

Re: "Anutin's govt is off to a flying start", (Opinion, March 23).

Veera Prateepchaikul appears to sincerely believe that you can be pro-democracy whilst denying citizens the right even to discuss, let alone amend, any law made by parliament. He is wrong.

He is, in fact, as wrong as the Democrat Party, which remains equally opposed to foundational democratic principles, and which, Veera admits, will not, therefore, work easily with the pro-democracy People's Party and its members, who are unjustly treated as criminals for advocating for the foundational democratic principle.

Perhaps the Post could invite Veera to write an opinion piece outlining his conception of what democracy is, and of how well Thailand and its laws, from the constitution down, might or might not comport with that ideal.

That could be part of a healthy, long-overdue discussion.

Should Veera think, for example, that merely having elections is sufficient, then even North Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as it deceitfully calls itself, is a democracy. But perhaps Veera does indeed hold that North Korea is a genuine democracy. I do not.

Selling kindness

Re: "Start from home", (PostBag, March 23) & "Can we design universal access to compassion?", (Opinion, March 19).

Ioan Voicu's reaction to the earlier opinion in the Bangkok Post is well taken.

I am aware that, through the 1980s and 1990s, Coca-Cola Thailand carried out a very vigorous marketing campaign on compassionate marketing to entrench the soft drink in consumers' loyalty.

My students and I were provided a workshop by one of the lead marketers, on the corporation's efforts to place Coca-Cola as the first in choice among soft drinks by advertising it as a compassionate neighbor, which stuck well with the Thai consumers of the time, given that the Thai society is close knit and the pee-nong relationship in social etiquette has prevailed even to this day.

Expanding from the Thai experience, I notice that Coca-Cola today has advertisements internationally espousing communal harmony, diversity tolerance, and camaraderie.

These are exemplary frameworks that set the tone of peace and amity in the face of discord and strife.

Let compassion prevail in whichever framework it works to keep the world in solidarity with kinship and humanism.