"Totally serious this time, guys"

It's a little odd living in a metro area of over 20 million people, just 35 miles from the Crappiest Place on Earth(tm). I can't deny that I get a little nervous from time to time, and last week, for the first time in 60 years, the North announced it would no longer recognize the DMZ and the cease fire. (You did know that, technically, the Korean Civil War is still going on, right?)

They're also using such snappy phrases as "rain fire" and "sea of flames", and much as the winter chilled me, that prospect is strangely unappealing to me. If they came over the border, there'd be many, many thousands of human deaths, and a cat.

But we haven't gotten any warnings from the US Embassy, unlike a year and a half ago after the North shelled the South's Yeonpyeong Island. At that point, the embassy sent out an email saying, basically, "We don't think anything's gonna happen, but if it does, come to the embassy and we'll put you on buses to Busan and fly you out of here." So, until we get something like that again, I'm not overly worried. (Although the doctor told me my brain was too tense: "Too tense the size of a normal brain.")

Nothing on a large scale will ever happen here unless the guys up north are totally nuts, because it would mean their complete destruction. They've shown over and over that they don't give a damn about their people, but they do care about themselves.

I've likened the situation here to living in Florida or California: you know there could be a 'cane or a 'quake, but you just go about your life.

Sometimes I think we should just give the rulers a billion gazillion dollars and one of those islands that Survivor has been based on and tell them to go away and lie in the sun. They're nasty little baskers.

A snowy mountainside

Yesterday's 38th Parallel hash run was in Uijeongbu, just north of Seoul, erstwhile (albeit fictional) home of the 4077th MASH. Though Hawkeye and BJ never set foot there, plenty of real doctors and nurses (and soldiers, American and Korean and Chinese) did. These days, Uijeongbu is full of high-rise apartments and convenience stores, but just north of the town, where the hash led, is all farmers' fields guarded by shivering chained-up dogs, and mountains covered in bare trees and wet snow.

The hash itself was arduous, 75 minutes of (for me) hard running followed by a long hike over a very high, very snowy, hill. Halfway up, already hundreds of feet above the valley, I turned around and it hit me, as it never has before: this was a horrible place. I looked down at the river and the little houses below and the big hill facing us across the valley and realized that real young men were hunkered down on this mountainside, perhaps readying to fire artillery down on other real young men on the flat below. And both sides (the American kids just out of high school up above and the Chinese farmers' sons below, or vice versa; it doesn't matter now) were shivering through the vicious winter, hoping or praying to live to see spring.

Seoul, just to the south, changed hands four times in twelve months. This place has seen much too much.

Yesterday, like today, was very foggy, so the forty-story apartment houses in the distance faded almost into nothingness and the valley below was silent. It felt like a dream, so that those poor guys on both sides, stuck here just before I was born, seemed almost more real than the twenty-first century waiting at the bottom of the mountain.

And the bunker sitting beside the trail (built by which side? Who knows?) testified that it was all real and, in the scheme of things, not that long ago.

And then it was time to go over the mountain and back into my world of Starbucks and 7-Elevens.

Fahrenheit 4? 5? 1?

The sun is just now setting over the mountains on Christmas Eve. It's c-c-cold; at the moment, the wind chill is 3 above zero Fahrenheit. It was well below zero this morning.

On the brighter side, though, there's always the threat of war. It's nice to know that Wolf Blitzer, in North Korea this week, called the Koreas "the most dangerous place on earth". I don't understand why the South, which for the last seven years has refused permission for a local church to erect a giant Christmas tree right by the DMZ, let them put it up this year. Why intentionally provoke the crazy guy in the attic? South Korea is two-thirds the size of Florida; they probably could have found another spot for the tree.

It's strange to be here right now. It's Christmas; my friends are in Ithaca or St. Augustine, the family's in California, and almost all of my coworkers taking off for Thailand or Indonesia or home during our two-week break. Nicki and Dex Puckett and their amazing month-old son Loku have asked me over for dinner this evening, so that's really nice. And tomorrow I'm taking the bus down to the city of Songtan for a hash (20 Fahrenheit with 25-mph winds forecast) and a little Christmas cheer at the pot luck afterward. But it's not quite how it used to be at Christmas.

There's only one present I want this year...

What a longish, strangish trip it's been

I've had a certain sense of unreality lately.

The most important factor, of course, has been the threat of war. (Unh! What is it good for?) The saber-rattling from both sides is enough to make even a cool character such as I (::koff::), in the words of Jeff Bridges as Starman, "little bit jumpy". If the US Embassy ever tells us to bug out, I'm going to pack up the still from the Swamp, velcro Tug to my coat and call him a fur collar, hop on the chopper, and look for "GOODBYE" spelled out on the ground with stones. But as I've said before, I really don't think there's much chance of a conflagration. Still...

The feeling of surreality deepened on Sunday: I'd been on three hash runs with the Yongsan Kimchi group; this time I went to a joint hash.

Huh huh huh... he said "joint" and "hash".

Anyway, the Southside Harriers were having their hash along with Yongsan, and I decided to join in, if only to decide which group I was more suited to.

Well, it was c-c-cold; the hashers run all year 'round. The run started inside the fish market, a warehouse a hundred yards long and twenty yards wide, filled with vendors selling every single thing on earth, as long as it a) came from the ocean and b) was dead. I saw (and smelled!) fish, squid, octopus, clams, crabs, and, I think, Aquaman.

After amusing the Koreans by running through the market, we ran and ran and ran with very few checkpoints where I might catch up with the pack. It was then that I realized that I didn't have my keys, wallet, transit card, or phone with me, so if I lost the trail I'd have to walk eight miles home in the frigid air and sit in my hallway because I couldn't get into my apartment.

...aaaand then we had to scale a six-foot fence by the river, which I can't. But did. ...aaaand then we had to climb the rusty iron rungs set into a frickin' frackin'forty-foot cement wall. I kept thinking, what happens if one of the people above me sneezes and lets go? And how very odd it would be if missiles started hitting as I was two-thirds of the way up. I may have muttered a rude word or two; I know that seems farfetched, but...

...aaaand then we had to climb another six-foot fence and run the bridge across the river. The trail led us, at one point, through a fringed cloth hanging and down Hooker Alley, which is lined with little glass rooms like display cases where, apparently, ladies of negoitable affection often sit and wait for nice young men to talk to. I half-expected little cards saying "4.49 per pound" in each area On this Sunday morning, one middle-aged lady of dubious charms was in one of the spots, but the rest were vacant. (Did I mention my sense of unreality lately?) I'm trying to be light and amusing here, but the whole thing made me feel very sad and a little dirty. (And me without my wallet...)

And the trail went on and on and on for miles, past the US Army base to the VFW. I didn't stay for the Thanksgiving buffet (I'd had a feast on Saturday with the Seoul Flyers). I did make up my mind that I'm going to run with the Yongsan hashers, not the Southsiders; Mr. Blister and UFO and Bootylicious and the Yongsan people are crazy, but they're not frickin' nuts.

(Two more runs and I get my hash name! I hope Kim Jong Il doesn't do anything till after that!)

To add to the oddity, winter has fallen like a lead Steinway and I rejoined the gym and went in to run today at 6:30 in the a. of m... meanwhile keeping one eye and one ear toward our Northern neighbors and waiting for my "normal" life to resume.

Here we go again

I suppose that once in awhile I should write about something besides running. So I will. (Though I did have a fun hash on Saturday and a good 10K race with my friend Lauren on Sunday. It was... oh, right, right. Back on topic.)

As you know if you've been able to tear yourself away from Dancing With the Stars, the North dropped a bucketload of missiles on South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island (two miles from North Korea and 70 or so from me) yesterday. The best guess I've seen online is that some generals did it to demonstrate their discontent with their loss of influence with the upcoming succession of Kim Young Jerk to replace his dad Kim Ug Ly. Two RoK marines were killed. I think about them and their families and about the fact that all of the boys we teach will be in the military in just a few years.

My friends abroad (I mean, back home) want to know how people are reacting and what it feels like to be here. I think it's like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the aftermath of a minor tremblor: will the other shoe drop? People go about their business and keep their ears open for further developments. Arirang, the English-language channel, devoted 15 minutes of the news to the attack, but didn't break into their regular shows.

I'm not scared, and absolutely everything spooks me: tall buildings, roller coasters, Snooki. The reason I'm not scared is that I don't think that the North's leaders are so bullgoose loony that they're suicidal. I know enough history to know that sometimes things just go much further than any sensible person anticipated, like the Civil War, World War I, and Sarah Palin. (Same joke twice: too much?) And the current RoK government is much more hard-line than its predecessors.

The US embassy sent us registered Yanks email that basically said they'll let us know if we need to bug out. I don't know how I could take flying out of here and leaving our kids behind. But I don't think that the bigwigs on either side of the border want to die; The North Korean leaders are capital-E Evil, so they wouldn't care, but the South Korean guys don't want hundreds of thousands of casualties. So I think it's going to be okay.

 

All the same, maybe I won't go tour the DMZ on our day off this Friday.

Not negligible

Ever since the sinking of the RoK ship Cheonan, sane people have been keeping one eye on the news. The Koreas have, legally speaking, been at war for 59 years now, and certainly our friend Mr. Kim up there, moribund though he may be, is capable of a lot of strange stuff. I've thought all along, though, that (whoever gave the order to sink the ship), the North Korean regime isn't crazy enough to initiate their own self-destruction. I still think that, and the South has taken a more-than-reasonable approach; twenty million people (in Greater Seoul) make for a pretty big chip to risk. So I'm not too worried. But I am paying attention.

Still, The New York Times calls the risk of war "not neglibible". It's just possible that some yahoo on either side of the border might start shooting over nothing, and we know that the North's government is perfectly content with millions of its citizens' dying... I guess a lot rides on China, which seems to be saying it's not going to support any more craziness KJI tries to pull. To put it indelicately, apparently they would pull their hand out of the puppet's... well, you know.

I, like every American who's got two brain cells to rub together, am registered with the US Embassy. We all get monthly bulletins in our inboxes, and the Embassy will contact us toot-sweet if we need to bug out. (I just hope I don't get the same Jeep as Frank Burns.)

Meanwhile, it feels rather like being in a tornado or earthquake zone and keeping alert. What's shocked me is that I (the second-most egocentric person I know [no, I'm not implying that you are the most]) am most concerned about my students; I'm mostly thinking how tragic an invasion or rain of missiles would be for them. That's not like me at all. Or... maybe... it finally is. And that, for me, is the upside of the Cheonan crisis.

When in danger or in doubt

...run in circles, scream and shout.

Kristen and her boyfriend James, who taught at my (Manchon) branch of LIKE and the Samduk location, respectively, took off for home without warning a few days ago. It was a shock to me; I didn't know them well, but they both were nice and, as far as I could see, they seemed content. They certainly left the schools in the lurch.

We all have contracts that say that if we don't stay six months, we have to pay back our airfare here, and if we don't complete the year, we don't get airfare home. Also, if we take off without giving notice, our visas are revoked and we can never get another one (not that that should bother somebody who's not happy here, of course). They could have talked to the management and worked out an amicable release.

But my point (and I do have one) is the reason they gave for leaving. James sent email to both schools (after their departure) saying that he'd talked to his lawyer, who'd said that that the dangerous conditions in Korea, with the North's nuclear and chemical preparations and uncertain power structure, justified fleeing the country without notice. (However, I notice that they managed to squeeze in a vacation in Japan just before they fled in panic.)

I have no idea if they gave their their real reason, but if so, it's as weak as Woody Allen's biceps; ain't no way anything bad will happen to Daegu in the immediate future. It does bring up something a few people have asked me, though, and that's been much on my mind: am I gonna die here? And will it be something other than listening to the Mets on the Internet that does me in?

On the face of it, it's crazy for me to move to Seoul, which I will be doing in two months; it's thirty miles from the DMZ, technically the war never ended, the North has 70 percent of its massive army deployed near the border, and a military magazine estimates that if the North attacks, there will be 200,000 deaths in Seoul in the first few days. Gulp.

I can't pretend that I don't think about it, especially considering that I've chosen to write about it. If the North's rulers ever feel pushed to the point where they would rather all die than lose face, well... gulp.

But they'd have to be bleedin' insane. Of course, this isn't the most reassuring thing with these guys. They obviously don't care if all their people die-- they have Stalinist prison camps, and have allowed massive starvation-- but I think that even they, deep down, are sensible enough to avoid their own utter destruction. They've also been playing military mind games for decades, so all of this isn't anything new. My friend Justin has noted that South Koreans are scared of a lot of things, including American beef and sleeping in a closed room with a fan blowing on your face, but they're not particularly concerned with all this. That's good enough for me. I'm too old to panic.

But when I get to Seoul in August, I am going to register at the US embassy, in case they ever want to tell all the Americans to get out. I'm also too old to not pay attention.

North Korea, nukes, and namaste

I've gotten a few messages from friends on Facebook wondering how I'm doing, what with the Dear Leader up north running another nuke test and firing off another test missile.

It doesn't seem to be making much of a stir here, aside from the tv news', as one would expect, devoting a fair amount of coverage and some headlines at the newsstands. (I think that's what they're about; of course, they're all in hangul script, but if I'm reading them right, they either say "We're All Going to Die in a Radioactive Hell" or "Kimchi Prices Up Five Percent".)

Actually, for me the biggest practical annoyance has been that nbc.com and Hulu block all NBC programs from being seen here, and in trying to watch this week's SNL, the only clip I can find of the Celebrity Jeopardy skit with Will Farrell as Alex Trebek, Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery, and Tom Hanks as a terminally dim Tom Hanks was made by some guy with a cell phone pointed at his tv screen, and I can't hear it even with headphones because of the ROKAF jets screaming over every few minutes. That's nothing new, but it is more frequent. Inconsiderate creeps.

It's always in the back of my mind that technically the ROK and the DPRK never signed a peace treaty, just a cease fire. There's a Korean army encampment two blocks from my apartment that runs for a mile alongside one of the main thoroughfares, and once I move to my new job, I'll be living within an hour of the world's last Stalinist state. which has nukes. But unless the Dear Leader up north is way, way crazier than I think, nothing's going to happen in the foreseeable future. I'd be more afraid if I lived in a big American city, knowing that the North could sell plutonium to some shady people with grudges.

Here's the thing, though: our species' technology has advanced just a bit faster than our morality. We're boiling the planet, we have the means to blow everything up real good, and we're still in the Dark Ages of our morality. We've got slavery, child prostitution, and genocide, just like five thousand years ago, but now we don't have to just hit our enemies with sticks.

If there's hope for the distant future, it has to be in the reformation of the individual human mind, an awakening of compassion and kindness on a scale that's never been seen before. We-- all of us who call ourselves human-- have to follow Christ in forgiving our "enemies" and follow Buddha in treating every being with compassion. A lot of New Thought writers, such as Eckhart Tolle and Marianne Williamson, say that this is the key moment in history, when humanity begins to awaken, and that we'll see it happening faster and faster. I only pray that they're right.

...and all of that is why I don't eat animals (suffering is suffering, killing is killing, and having somebody else do the deed for us does not absolve us), why I close my emails with "peace", why I work to contain my own anger, and why I'm risking alienating you with what may be a sanctimonious, pompous (and to a degree, I'm sure, hypocritical) blog entry.

In rereading this, it doesn't sound right. I don't think I quite got it, and I care about how I write things. But it feels as if, this time, saying something imperfectly is better than not saying it at all.

Namaste, my friends.