Another horrible misuse of facebook reported on cbsnews.com.

Of one of my favorite Korean movies is titled 두사부일체 (頭師父一體; doo-sa-boo-il-chae). Comedic content aside, merely the title itself can resonates with most, as it roughly translates to: Your boss, your teacher, your father are one. Meaning, as much as you respect your father, so should you respect your teacher and boss. Of course, in order to be respected, one has to be respectable, but there is, to be sure, an undervaluing of teachers in our society. That has to change.

Kristof, in his NY Times Op-Ed Column titled “How Mrs. Grady Transformed Olly Neal“, tells an account of a teacher who, through the type of teacher she was, exuded respectability:

At a high school reunion, Grady stunned Neal by confiding to him that she had spotted him stealing that first book. Her impulse was to confront him, but then, in a flash of understanding, she realized his embarrassment at being seen checking out a book.

So Grady kept quiet. The next Saturday, she told him, she drove 70 miles to Memphis to search the bookshops for another novel by Yerby. Finally, she found one, bought it and put it on the library bookshelf.

Twice more, Grady told Neal, she spent her Saturdays trekking to Memphis to buy books by Yerby — all in hopes of turning around a rude adolescent who had made her cry. She paid for the books out of her own pocket.

By the clandestine care of Grady, Neal went from a troubled teen on to become a college graduate, law student, district attorney, and then a judge. Kristof claims that such teachers need to be properly valued in the education system, and can possibly be part of the solution to larger social problems:

The big-hearted Grady, now dead, is a reminder that teachers may have the most important job in America. By all accounts, Grady transformed many other children as well, through more mundane methods.

To me, the lesson is that while there are no silver bullets to chip away at poverty or improve national competitiveness, improving the ranks of teachers is part of the answer. That’s especially true for needy kids, who often get the weakest teachers. That should be the civil rights scandal of our time.

So as an encouragement to all the great, personable, and sacrificial teachers out there. Keep it up. Though the product of your labors are often hard to see, it is valuable work.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
-T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Let’s try something interactive. Take a look at the picture on the left. Which side of the tangerine do you claim is the ‘head’ and which is the ‘tail’? I have always thought it obvious that B was the ‘head’ of the tangerine because the tangerine hangs with B facing the sky  and with A pointing to the ground. Thus, it always puzzled me as to why my mother would flip all the tangerines on the fruit plate so that A would be facing up. I would inquire as to why and she would confidently reply “…because it’s (A) the top.” Then the other day, I decided to do something I did not think to do before… hear more of her explanation. I asked why she thinks it’s the top. She explained, along with my father who shared her perspective, “Because B is where it attaches to the tree and is closest to the root of the tree and A is the farthest from the root of the tree.” The definition of ‘top’ or ‘head’ for them was the part of the fruit that was farthest from the root of the tree. My definition of ‘head’ was the part of the fruit facing the sky when it hangs. Their definition included the tree with the fruit, and mine, only the fruit (Possible analogy to collective vs individual thinking? That for another time).

I do not know which is the correct way to see the top of a tangerine, nor do I know even who or how will determine the matter, but it is interesting that my parents perspective was such a different way of seeing the exact same fruit. And more embarrassingly amazing is how blinded I was in being able to see that perspective. Once again, I am reminded of a favorite quote from my favorite theologian: Audi Partem Alteram. (St Augustine)

We always like to think others as more parochial than ourselves. If this is so, we must be spectacular listeners, but in truth, are we?

Philly International. Chicago O’Hare. Tokyo Narita. Seoul Inchon. A mom making faces with her daughter. Teenager squating next to a plug surfin the web. An Asian girl checking her split ends for 15 minutes. Ten individuals reading their own respective literature. Three people watching movies on their iphones. Many others eating their to-go lunches, all separately, in their own worlds.

The airport is truly a petri dish of selfish bacteria. Maybe that’s too harsh. How about the bacteria of individualism? Everyone is doing something apart from most anyone else and they are busy moving, trying to get to where they want to be. Most everyone in the airport is concern mostly for themselves. Looking out for number one. Notice when a plane lands, almost all the passengers are thinking one thing: I need to get out. Out in the waiting spaces, everyone is compartmentalized within themselves.

Maybe such individualistic activity really is just an extension of city life, or maybe it is a result of fatigue. Not physical fatigue but fatigue set on by knowing one is far from home. Mental fatigue that comes from thinking you are ‘on the road.’ Spiritual fatigue, even, knowing you don’t ‘belong.’ Makes you wonder. How many of us know where our true home is? How many of us have a place to rest? Not knowing such seems only natural that we become tired, selfish, individualistic, not just in the airport but in the journey of life. It is only natural that the comforted are ones who can turn their inward attention, what Augustine called curvatus in se, outward. In this journey called ‘life’ where can we rest our heads?

But then again, airports aren’t all that bad as anyone who’s seen the beginning of ‘Love Actually’ knows. But that for another time.

Many have predicted, or maybe just hoped, for the opening of the NK borders and the falling of the regime with Kim Jong-Il’s death as the potential catalyst. Adrian Hong, with an article in Foreign Policy titled “How to Free North Korea“, argues that NK will inevitably fall and that it is only a matter of “when and how”. He adds that it is the moral responsibility of the global community to organize and be active in the process instead of waiting:

This much is clear: North Korea will fall. It is simply a question of when and how. But it is far better to have a coordinated, controlled landing, at the time of one’s choosing, instead of waiting for the worst to happen at any moment. And a reunified, free Korea can be a powerful force for good in the world, and a potent economic engine.

But missing this opportunity to bring Pyongyang into the international community would be a grievous error. North Korea’s crimes do not end at its own borders. Beyond state-sponsored acts of terror, kidnappings, and assassination attempts of foreign government officials, human rights activists, and defectors, it has also sold weapons, missiles, technology, and nuclear materials to a who’s who of unfriendly countries, including Egypt, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. It has engaged in the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, mass government-sanctioned insurance fraud, and the exportation of North Korean slaves all over the world.

North Korea is not a modern nation-state. It does not exist for the welfare of its populace, nor to safeguard the rights of it’s citizens. It exists for the sole benefit of the king and his barons — a ridiculously-scaled Mafia criminal state — and must be treated as such.

The very progress of our global civilization is for naught if we continue to let the very idea of North Korea exist. North Korea is not a failed state, with warlords fighting for land and treasure. Its atrocities do not stem from factional fighting, crimes of passion, or mob violence. It is on another level entirely — a staggering system entirely built and mastered for the express purpose of propagating human suffering and ensuring the continued exploitation of the people so that the very few can benefit.

It is a moral obligation of the highest order that the international community intervene. What can be done, we must do — and now is the time.

The political, international and global implications are of great interest to me, but my knowledge on such perspectives are limited. And ultimately, the eternal perspective on the effect of this death event seems to me of greater importance. So what are the implications (from an eternal perspective)? In some ways nothing. As one of my professor likes to say “[God] is God, and we are not. He is God and there is no other.” (From God with Us). Kim Jong-Il is dead and God is alive. Kim Jong-Il will answer to God in all he did as any ‘good’ or ‘evil’ man will. Joe Carter makes an interesting comparison in the post “The Shared Fate of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il“, the former was a good man and the latter, despicable, and yet without Christ their end fate is the same: condemnation. As true and important is the message of Carter’s blog, I don’t find it particularly helpful for the occasion. Is the Gospel Coalition so concerned to protect the gospel of grace from the intrusion of works, that the millions in NK who have no access to the gospel of grace is of lesser concern? These may be erred assumptions but the sense one gets is a business to protect rather than to advance the gospel. While articles like Hong’s are optimistic, in an ephemeral perspective, towards the opening of the country, where is the eternal perspective and the optimism of the Church for gospel advancement in NK? Ed Stetzer and Justin Taylor start us possibly in the right way, but more is needed. Stetzer and Taylor call for prayer, and yes, in that sense, God will work his eternal plan. Maybe NK will not follow suit to the revolutions of the Middle East, but I cannot help but hope that the Church is ready. That is, when NK opens, however it will open, the Church be ready, not merely with gospel tracks to hand out or with just arms length evangelism, but with up-close, personal, live-with evangelism, to be ready to give the gospel with our lives and not just our words.

Isn’t it rather ironic that the Korean War is technically not over, and yet the Korean people (particularly the South) live as if it is peace time? The irony lies in the similarity of the Christian illusion to spiritual peace. How often does the Christian Church live as if there is peace, that there is no spiritual war raging on? It may be that NK does not open up for a while, maybe not even in the lifetime of the “Great Successor” Kim Jong-Eun. But the question remains. Will the Church be prepared to invade the vacuum of religion in the people of NK or will that opportunity, when presented, slip through her fingers?

It seems that Christians, maybe more so Christian pastors, have this ‘minority report tendency’. Over the years, in conversations with friends in the pastoral occupation concerning their ‘flock’, I have noticed that what they look for or are sensitive to tendencies and underlying motivations. Maybe it is because of the American popularization of psychologizing ourselves. Now, you may ask, what’s the big deal about that? Nothing, really. That is, until judgement or suspicion is channeled into the action of confrontation. To explain… Take a moment and think as if you are NOT a Christian. I could be wrong, but I observe that most judgement, accusation, or correction occurs, for a non-Christian, post commitment of the ‘crime’ or ‘sin’ (whatever you want to call it). Before the action of ‘wrong’ occurs nothing is suspected, no mention of changing any behavior, no red balls from the Minority Report. Such a nonchalance to immoral potential is, quite frankly, refreshing. It makes the company fun to hang out with. Christians, on the other hand, tend to judge, accuse, or correct before the action of the ‘crime’ is committed, such accusations  are based on tendencies or assumed motivations and happen ‘pre-crime’. We predict the crime and attempt to prevent it from ever happening, in the days of the Pharisees (’1st century Jews’), it was called “fence building”. Rules were added on top of each other so that you would not get close to breaking the original rule, that is, if walking 10 miles on the Sabbath was prohibited, then maybe walking 9 miles was later prohibited, then 8 miles; fences built to protect oneself from reaching the original fence of ‘resting on the Sabbath’. Such unreasonable wariness makes Christians into unlikable company. It’s in a word, stuffy, like the Pharisees.

(From www.cartoonaday.com)

Of course, this is not to say that there is no value in Christian ‘pre-crime’ tendencies. It is important to inspect one’s motives, one’s tendencies, primarily because sin does not hit you like an eighteen wheeler head-to-head collision, but rather, it creeps up on you, like a frog in slow heated water, swimming nonchalantly insensitive to the incremental rise in temperature, until eventually, it dies. But ‘fence building’ is no better. Those who ‘build fences’ live lives like people with OCD, keeping a mile of a distance from any potential ‘sinfulness’ that we become unenjoyable company to those around us and in a sense, miss out on vibrant life (let alone one’s evangelistic capacity to enter the broken, dirty, sinful in order to be a redeeming presence). Certainly, crime is bad, sin is deadly and predictions still an impossibility. But in such a mix, which is our reality, how do we prevent ourselves from ending up  as a dead frog or a despicable pharisee?

Tim Challies, though, writes in his post “Christians and Alcohol” about how the way we treat the issue reveals our immaturity. Particularly for those who cry “Christian Freedom!” as a license to drink, he says the implicit disdain we have on those that seem a little stricter on alcohol consumption is a sign of immaturity. Challies comments on a quote by John MacArthur, “If everything you know about Christian living came from blogs and websites in the young-and-restless district of the Reformed community, you might have the impression that beer is the principle symbol of Christian liberty.”:

What I saw as I read that post is the reality that this older generation sees the younger crowd as celebrating freedom by rubbing it in their face. They hear us saying, “We are liberated by grace; you are bound by law.” They are convinced that instead of respecting them and honoring them, we are sneering at them and looking down at them. Instead of using our freedom in love and respect, we are using our freedom carelessly and even spitefully.

Many who tout Christian freedom and maybe even grace seem to easily fall into a superiority complex over those who are more old-fashioned and seemingly legalistic. Even if those ‘others’ are in fact legalistic, grace never leads to superiority or disdain. If it does, it is, in fact, a sign of immaturity in the understanding of grace.

Booz or no booz, whichever perspective you fall under, most likely the issue is not the alcohol itself (after all, it is merely flavored C2H5OH) but rather the heart you harbor toward those who hold the perspective unlike your own. So then, how do you fare, when alcohol measures your maturity?

My pride stems from K-pop’s growing global influence and the unprecedented success it is having outside the Asian continent. Jon Caramanica writes “Korean Pop Machine, Running on Innocence and Hair Gel” in the New York Times:

In the past few years K-pop has shown a creeping global influence. Many acts release albums in Korean and Japanese, a nod to the increasing fungibility of Asian pop. And inroads, however slight, are being made into the American marketplace. The acts here sang and lip synced in both Korean and English. Girls’ Generation recently signed with Interscope to release music in the United States. And in August Billboard inaugurated a K-Pop Hot 100 chart. But none of the acts on the SM Town Live bill are in the Top 20 of the current edition of the fast-moving chart. This is a scene that breeds quickly.

Of course, the quote does affirm that there is much more to achieve in the international realm of music. But as the achievements are my reason for pride, at the same time, these achievements no less produce concern and worry. That question that places this concern in the realm of inexplicable uneasiness is this: “What kind of influence does this growing global phenomenon have on the mind of viewers and listeners?” Not unlike the influence wrought out by the increasing popularity of Korean Dramas (which I address, in part, in this previous post “Korean Dramas? A Female Addiction?“), the powerful nature of K-pop’s “innocence and hair gel”, to use the article title, is the influence it has on the images that shape our desires. On the side of women, the desire to look like these perfect Asian girls on stage may have contributed to the increase and normalization of plastic surgery in the Korean peninsula, possibly a similar influence that the ‘barbie doll’ has on its young fans.  On the side of men, the standards of attraction are unreasonably externalized, that is men’s standards of beauty become highly idealistic to put it mildly. Of course, these are very simplified concerns and explanations and I am sure there are more complex perspectives on the influence of this K-pop phenomenon. A disclaimer must be made for those who may want to demonize the K-pop industry or phenomenon without warrant or even ridicule K-pop for is lack of musical excellence, for anyone who does, has not experienced the fun of the ‘noraebang’, acting silly and goofy with friends while singing songs that are quite not up to the musical standards of Chopin or Mozart. Such western snobbery forgets that America is the land of the Justin Bieber, Hanna Montana, Backstreet Boys and the like.

But to return to the sense of uneasiness, that sentiment does not merely emerge from K-pop’s influence upon image or the standards of beauty. It stems also from the concern Bob Goudzwaard addresses in Capitalism and Progress. That progress, to crudely simplify, becomes the idolatry of capitalism. That progress instead of the true beauty of the art form or work becomes the ultimate goal. This well-oiled K-pop machine drives itself on ‘innocence and hair gel’ as a means to reach the end goal of increasing popularity. It does anything at all cost to increase its following, not unlike capitalism. Currently those means are skinnier and younger boys and girls with make up on stage, these means may change (though unlikely), but the end goal will always be the same, fame and money. The art forms of music, dance, and theatrics are in this perspective exploited to achieve the end of fame and money, and in the process, the drive to discover the beauty of such art forms is forgotten.

All good work contains in it, beauty that wants to be tapped and discovered. Even finance and economics, as difficult as it may be to see, contains in it an aesthetic nature, but it is lost when that art form or work merely becomes a means to an end. I am hopeful that there are some in the K-pop industry who engage in their careers to unearth the beauty in their art form, to improve and discover. But for those that are in it only for the popularity that skinny bodies, make-up, and fireworks bring, it may be good to listen to the experienced counsel of Madonna:

‘I have an iron will,’ she says, eating her Ceasar. ‘And all of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of inadequacy. I’m always struggling with that fear. I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being and then I get to another stage and think I’m mediocre and uninteresting. And I find a way to get myself out of that. Again and again. My drive in life is from this horrible fear of being mediocre. And that’s always pushing me, pushing me. Because even though I’ve become Somebody, I still have to prove that I’m Somebody. My struggle has never ended and it probably never will.’ (From Vanity Fair, “The Misfit” by Lynn Hirshberg)

An article from The Economist points out that in a report given by the education ministry “in September 2010, the punishment for teachers who commit sex crimes is usually nothing more than a salary cut or a short-term suspension. It is typical for other categories of convicted sex criminals to be sentenced either to suspended sentences, fines or probation.”

Other such injustices that point to the weakness or failure of the rule of law are incidents such as the following that a New York Times article points out, the article titled, “Film Underscores Koreans’ Growing Anger Over Sex Crimes“:

Last year, for example, Chey Cheol-won, 41, a trucking company owner and cousin of one of the country’s richest men, was convicted of hitting a 52-year-old former union activist 13 times with an aluminum baseball bat while his executives watched. He then wrote out a 20 million won check on a company account and threw it in the victim’s face. Mr. Chey received a suspended sentence.

The rise in awareness has, in the case of South Korea, moved politicians to slowly change laws and pass bills that strengthen laws that have often been so inept to protect the weak, poor and disabled. Once again, this political stir in the far east guides my attention to the people who think they are the 99% of this world, toward the people who think they are the oppressed. Yes, maybe relatively speaking, they are economically oppressed. Yes, there may be a point in saying that America doesn’t struggle with such issues as the rule of law. Yes, the heart of the Occupy movement may even source itself from a noble cause, but quite frankly, it most likely will not escape the label of a temper tantrum. What the Occupy people need (wait, they don’t even know what they are asking for…) is a dose of realism, to use the English idiom, to understand that there are bigger fish to fry. To get out of that small pond of ethnocentrism, of individualism. To get out into an ocean of bigger perspectives. To learn the world.

By Doug Savage (www.savagechickens.com)

A friend of mine had a ‘gchat’ status up the other day that went something like this: ‘The occupy wall street is the 2nd dumbest idea for a protest. The first being the Korean protests over Dok-do’ (I apologize for the paraphrase). His reasoning placing the Dok-do dispute at #1 was due to how people were protesting, I am unsure but he was possibly referring to this: “Event to honor Nongae draws fire“. Though I do not sense the extreme nationalism that some Koreans feel concerning their ownership of the island, I do personally think Dokdo is worthy of protest due to its economic significance, though the methods of protest are another story.

As for the ’2nd dumbest idea’ of a protest, this Occupy Wall Street movement does, in many ways, deserve that informal title, but mainly for two reasons. One, the cursory message of the protest seems awfully like socialism: “Distribute that wealth that those 1% earned through the system that we are ALL a part of.” And if it is true that this is the main message, then those holding up signs “This is not the world our parents wanted for us”, well, neither is the one you’re asking for. Second, I really do not think that all the people out there really believe the thrust of the protest, that is the nature of mob mentality, you join sometimes just to be part of the crowd and even at the expense of the truth (here’s an interesting article concerning that: “The Crowd is Untruth“).

Ultimately, what irks the protesters of this protest, I believe, is not the issues at hand but the childishness of the protesters. Meaning, they are not the 99%. Nor are they the 1%. But relative to the global community, they are above average, whatever that percentage may be. This makes the protesters look like they just want to be the 1%, it make them look as greedy as the people of Wall Street, just on a smaller scale. But this protest can be of some value if everyone knew for what they should be protesting. Someone who knows the difference between extreme poverty and the working poor (he defines it in his book, The End of Poverty) seems to shed some light. Jeffrey Sachs writes in his article “Occupy Wall Street and the Demand for Economic Justice“:

The sense of injustice, in short, is not just about the unfairness of a small part of society living in unimaginable wealth while so much of the rest of society lives in economic desperation. It’s not just about the top 12,000 American households with more income than the poorest 24 million households. It’s about the degradation of politics that turns wealth into power through campaign financing, lobbying, and the revolving door of business and government.

“Wealth into power”. That won’t change. Money by definition holds in it influence, which is power. But what must change is the “revolving door”. The destination of the power, so to speak. Is power, whether in the medium of money or anything else, being used to serve the people? Or is power being used to maintain power? When the revolving door keeps cycling power into itself, that is when politics truly degrades.

Sachs, ends on a positive note concerning the protests and is very supportive. I am still skeptical. Again, not because of what it stands for, but mainly because I do no think it will work. Call it pessimism, but this one I’ll throw in the basket of realism. Because I know that greed (along with pride) are the two biggest problems of humanity. They are what makes us inhumane. The solution? We need to find something that turns us outward, vacating the ‘I want’ of our primary concerns and replacing it with ‘how can I give?’. There is one thing that can do this, but I don’t think most of America has found it yet.