This diary is one that I've thought about writing for about a year now (since Barack Obama was elected) but have never been able to condense into a single cohesive idea. So maybe I'll just write without one and see what happens. It's a half personal diary entry, but probably also applies to a lot of other people as well and expands into a more general theme near the end.
I'll start with myself: the main obsession in my life since 1998 has been languages, since I one day decided while working in a boring office in Calgary that I was going to learn Japanese to fluency and leave office work and Canada behind. To make a very long story short, skip ahead a decade later and the interest in Japanese (I did become fluent by the way - JLPT lv. 1 and Kanji kentei pre-lv. 1) has turned into an interest in languages as a whole, and with that came about an interest in geopolitics. In 2007 I spent a lot of time on Turkish and have become quite good, and now I am working on Persian. I currently live in Korea.
Now to explain what this has to do with the price of tea in China..
Here's the gist of it: since 2008 I have had a site called Page F30 where I write about such subjects (space, languages, geopolitics, regular politics). Here's one about Persian, here's one about Iran in the 1970s, and I even was able to catch John McCain in the act in 2008 when he removed references to himself as "the one" after creating that ad attacking Barack Obama, and Crooks & Liars picked up on that too. Oh, and a mention on Huffington Post for an idea I had to help translate relevant tweets in Persian into English. So all in all the site is going quite well, and I'm very pleased with my online activity.
But...
When offline, I'm just a guy living in Korea, which is about as far from all these issues as you can possibly get. Yes, there is the North Korean issue but that country is still locked down and there really just isn't anything that an individual can do, at least compared to a country like Iran where at least people can enter and leave and write on blogs, and people like Mousavi and Karroubi can express their opinion and so on. Now 30,000 extra troops are being sent to Afghanistan, apparently the languages I either know or are studying now are so valuable to places like the CIA (not that I'm looking to join the CIA mind you, this is just an example) that they are willing to pay up to $35,000 in signing bonuses for those fluent in these languages. Korean, Turkish, Persian, that sort of thing.
I often watch BBC Turkish / Persian and other sources while studying, and you'll often see footage of a press conference between someone like Erdoğan or Mottaki or someone else, and always half the people attending are listening to the speech through headsets in order to get it translated, and I'll often sit there and watch Erdoğan or whoever talk about something like Nagarno-Karabakh (the region that Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a small war over, one that has become a cold conflict) in Turkish unfiltered and think, "shouldn't I somehow be a part of this too?" Or I'll watch and understand an interview from BBC Persian with a citizen in Afghanistan talking about some important issue while in the meantime the US and other NATO countries are doing their best to improve the situation there and wonder if I shouldn't be finding a way to help out there as well.
Then I often wonder whether there are a lot of other people out there as well in a similar situation, because I always see people here that have friends or family in Country X or are fluent in (mission critical) Language Y, but haven't yet been able to put that skill to best use.
So that's the gist of what I've been thinking about for a while - how to use one's skills to make more of a difference, and also how to do as much as possible both offline and on. I'd like to hear some examples of how people here have been able to take a situation where they were only making a bit of a difference, and turned it into something much bigger than that. I'm really curious how many other people are kind of in the same boat - content overall and making a difference, but often wondering what more could be done.
Oh, and would simply up and moving to Washington one day be a good idea?