We weep for the South. We send prayers and we will remember, or try our best to remember, all the deaths and not consign them to the faceless realm of statistics. On Wednesday night, ruthless, lawless, godless insurgents killed six civilians, including two-year-old Jakarin Hiangma, in a sign of escalating violence that leaves Buddhists and Muslims alike in shame and shock.
As the "negotiations" between the government and Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) lurch forward - with much confusion over what the government's strategy is and with our apparent lack of intelligence about the insurgency - the daily nightmare suffered by locals is a reminder that while patience is a virtue, what happens in the South is a national crisis that has dragged on for nearly a decade with no evident thaw.
Since Jan 1, 2004, more than 5,000 people have been killed in the far South. Last month was the deadliest in a long time, with 30 people killed and 75 injured, an increase from March which was already deadly enough.
Personally, I feel bad quoting these numbers. Mathematics and rhetoric feel gross, aloof, safe, paper-based, immaterial, compared to the visceral terror that the folk down there (some of whom are my friends) have to face in their own homes. What I fear is that, in many ways, our long-distance consumption of southern horror and the media's military-based reporting of the ongoing trouble are desensitising us, reducing our reaction to sentimental head-shaking or world-weary "not again".
I'm guilty in that department, too. When I was young, I remember growing up hearing so much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - long before I understood the difference between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, or between Intifada and terrorism, or between Hamas and Fatah - and as time went on and the fighting went on, it all became a blur, a hazy mix of accusations and explosions by anonymous enemies, to the point where I thought I would stop caring about something so irrelevant, so far away from my daily grind.
That's not what I want the South to become: something that deprives us of our ability to be hit in the head.
Southern people are hit in the head all the time. The latest surge in violence took place after the late-February signing of the peace talks deal - a historic event in its own right since it's the first time the Thai state has acknowledged the existence of the separatists. It was also around the ninth anniversary of the Krue Sue massacre, in which soldiers killed 32 trouble-makers armed with knives who were holed up inside a mosque on the morning of April 29, 2004. That same day, 76 others were gunned down by the army in various clashes in the South.
While we mourn the recent deaths of the innocent and curse the savagery of the insurgents, the deadly siege of Krue Se mosque inevitably enters any discussion of the deep South shambles.
Justice, as promised by the prime minister and the military, is constitutionally applicable to all. What happened at Krue Se, one of the worst state-sponsored killings in our modern history, has become a monument to military injustice that confirms the ideology of the separatist radicals. It's a scar, a forced tattoo.
It's an incident - along with the Tak Bai horror when the army tied up protesters and piled them up in a truck, resulting in more than 70 deaths - that will always be used to recruit disaffected young men to join the movement and to justify violence.
Gen Panlop Pinmanee, the man who commanded the military action at Krue Se eight years ago, is now serving as a counsellor to Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. The PM (Mongolian speech aside) looks like a dove, but she makes sure to keep a hawk by her side.
I'm not sure if this is a "development", but lately the southern mess is characterised less in terms of Buddhist versus Muslim, the line that seemed to influence the debate when the problem flared up in 2004. Of course there's a degree of religious tension, but we can see now that the governing dimension is ethnicity, which encompasses the broader issues of race, language, religion and history (the BRN speak Malay, not Arabic, and their historical memory is that of the Patani Kingdom, not a Middle Eastern caliphate). Ethnicity, however, is no less powerful than religion in breeding hatred and cruelty (just look northwest to the senseless killings and torching of Muslims in Myanmar).
Throw in the devil of nationalism - both the separatists' version as well as our own - and I'm heartbroken to say that we'll continue to weep, at least for a long while to come.
Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.