North Korean FearMongering

Just in case any of my friends in the West are curious, over here in South Korea, I hear almost nothing at all about North Korean missile tests or nuclear brinkmanship. My wife doesn't talk about it at all, and when I do decide to tell her the current news (that I have to go to the various foreign English language news sources to get), she usually hasn't heard even a single word of any of it.

In fact, the prevailing opinion in South Korea, about the current crisis, is that nothing (beyond the usual North Korean bully boy posturing and fear mongering) is going to happen. And if you ask most Koreans why they think that way, they will tell you that all of their lives, there has been one false alarm coming from the North after the next. In fact, the vicious rhetoric and constant threats coming from North Korea has all become so routine over the past 65+ years, that most Koreans simply no longer take any of it seriously at all.

As a result, here in South Korea, when I do hear something about North Korea, it's usually coming from the little students of our school, who sometimes make fun of how fat and dumb looking they think North Korean despot Kim Jong-Un is!

Also, just to clarify, I do NOT currently live in China. My wife is South Korean, NOT Chinese, Japanese, etc. Of course, I have been to Japan a couple of times, and I lived long term in both Shanghai, China and Taiwan previously (and I've visited almost every other Chinese speaking nation or city state, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao and Malaysia), but to be quite honest, the 6 years (cumulative) that I spent teaching English in Chinese speaking countries totally and thoroughly turned me off and disillusioned me about Chinese CULTure in general.

Yes, I did meet and even befriend plenty of nice, sensible, and often generous and kind people in Taiwan over the course of 5 1/2 years. After all, as they say, "people are people," regardless of race, sex, national origin, etc, but overall, I found that, due to the long ailing nature of Chinese civilization (that has been in trouble for quite literally hundreds of years now), I simply could not trust most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis in one way or another.

Primarily because of really old, but horrifically corrupt customs like "lying to save face," which has unfortunately become so deeply ingrained in the various societies of this part of the world, that it affects absolutely everything in the lives of the people who, sadly, get indoctrinated into clearly unhealthy customs such as these. And sorry, all you well meaning folks out there, but there really isn't any way to just wishfully think any of the more negative aspects of any corrupt society away.

No matter how "open minded," non-"racist," or "liberal" one may truly hope to be. Because whether we like it or not, some aspects of human culture are positive and beneficial, while others, such as cultures that propagate vicious and/or self destructive ideologies, such as Nazism and Communism, simply prove, time and time again, to be terribly negative and detrimental to human society as a whole.

So, whether it was an adult student in Taipei, Taiwan, coming in to one of my classes one day, all excited because she'd just, the day before, eaten whale ("Shhhh!"), a well known endangered species that is now mostly only (and quite illegally) hunted by the Japanese, to all the Taiwanese who, when I told them how I'd nearly been run over by yet another recklessly driving motorist on the way to work, who simply scolded me, and told me to "be more careful," I'm afraid I came away from all that with a very, very, very bad taste in my very, very, very American mouth.

'Cause see, I too was raised to have a bit of culture, you know. And as a result, I just plain know better. So I know when someone is full of crap -- regardless of their "race," sex, nationality, politics, religion, etc, etc, etc.

On the Nature of "Stoicism," or Perhaps Deep-Seated Angst

Because, after a while, that big, toothy grin really begins to not look so very much like a genuine smile anymore. And that's  because quite often, it really isn't. It's a mask. It's virtually the only socially acceptable ("politically correct") way to mask almost every one of the other dark, or even downright ugly, emotions that all created equal human beings everywhere experience - but are not necessarily forced by their draconian society to conceal with quite so much... passive-aggressive zeal.