I live in Seoul, South Korea. I'm an English teacher at a University. And today I am living through my very own Cuban Missile Crisis.
Follow me beneath the fold...
Let me tell you my story first... I'm an English teacher in South Korea. I came here in November 2007, originally to teach at a hagwon (for those not in the know, an independently run English institute). I was getting over a girl hard and bored with my life in Boston, so I figured this would be a good break from the mundane. And it was. It was a fantastic experience to teach and live in another country. Fantastic as in amazing, not necessarily great. Some parts were great for sure, but some were awful (like the time I had a racist Korean man curse out my Korean girlfriend for dating a white guy, but that's another story). But all those diverse experiences, good and bad, came together to form my new life in this country. My contract at the hagwon ran out last December, and originally my plan was to come back to the USA for good. However, three things happened: I met a spectacular girl last year that I'm in love with, the US economy took a dump, and I got offered a much better job teaching English at a major University here. So I went home to the states for a couple months to catch up with family and friends, came back in February for the girl and the job, and continued on with my Korean life. And it was going so well...
You see, I have a crazy neighbor. Yes, maybe your neighbor is crazy too. Maybe he yells at you when you leave your sprinklers on, or your dog craps on his yard. But he doesn't threaten to go to war with you.
Monday, North Korea tested a nuke underground. Tuesday, they tested some short-range missiles. Wednesday, they tested some more short-range missiles, warned they would test long-range ballistic missiles and backed out of the 1953 armistice with South Korea with a declaration that they are now in a legal "state of war." Wednesday wins for "most terrifying."
My students tell me not to be scared. They laugh and say these flare-ups happen all the time. They're used to it. They've been dealing with this shit all their lives. Most of them are still pre-occupied with the suicide of the former Korean President over the weekend. So they help calm me down a bit. And then I watch the news and find out we're at security level 4. Security level 5 only happens after the first bullet is shot. And when I hear news like this, all my carefully collected tranquility and reason flies out the window, once again replaced with sheer panic.
I am nervous. Hell, I'm scared. It doesn't help when you see a CNN poll with over half of Americans saying we should engage North Korea militarily. It also doesn't help when supposed friends back in the US are posting their jingoistic wet dreams as status-updates on Facebook, proclaiming from their armchairs that we "should level Korea." (Notice no distinction made between South and North?) You guys either don't get it, or just don't fucking care...
I don't mean you. I mean Americans as a collective. You think you snap your fingers and the bad guys go away. No. You send men and missiles into that country and they would send men and missiles back. Maybe some freshly cooked plutonium, who knows... You don't know the people over here. You don't want to. You want to think of them as pixels in some entertaining 'Shock and Awe' videogame, fireworks to "ooh" and "ahhh" at on CNN. They are not a videogame. My life is not a videogame. These people are my friends. They are my students. They are the girl I love. They are me.
Stop it.