After all, it's a small world

    We did not visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the 38th Parallel during our five months in Korea in 2011, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that tours were taking tourists far enough north to "see" into North Korea. We had opportunities, I suppose; several times we traveled to Seoul from our community in Busan on the KTX. We might have ventured further, but neither of us felt lured by the opportunity to view forbidden land to the north. And the idea that a buffer zone between warring countries could be viewed as a form of entertainment was unsettling.

    Busan, where we were living in a graduate student dorm, lies within the Pusan Perimeter, which was the small corner of the Korean Peninsula around the port of Pusan not overrun by the North during the 1950-53 hot war. Among other things, Busan (then Pusan) was the seat of the ROK Provisional Government, backed by the UN. The government returned to Seoul once it was following General Douglas McArthur's famously risky and famously successful sea landing at Incheon. That was September 15, 1950.

 

     During our all-too-brief residence in Korea, our interest both in my teaching assignment and with our living situation was to live and work among Koreans. This meant, of course, that we were able to see, hear, and rub shoulders with more Koreans -- to be Korean as much as possible. We had specifically requested we not be put in an American compound.

    We were only in country about five months, but our observations during that time confirmed over and over that during the 1950-53 war in Korea everyone suffered. Even those who never left Pusan or who had fled to the relatively protected area around Pusan itself suffered unimaginably.

    It is interesting to me that all the stories I have read about that period, especially those written by Koreans, speak to the overwhelming fear, deprivation, uncertainty, unnecessary loss of life, and stress all Koreans experienced. My first Korean "war novel" was Wan-Suh Park's Who Ate Up all the Shinga? While"shinga" a "survival food" (think, perhaps, dandelion greens) that ordinary people might forage, Park's novel describes the unrelenting horrors and losses experienced by one family, caught as they were between armies from the North and armies from the South. It is a heartbreaking read.

    The Korean University students I taught were unwilling on the whole to write about this period of war. Many had been shielded from its horrors to the point of ignorance; most just wanted to leave the past alone. I understand that reluctance. Nevertheless, some were forthcoming when asked to describe their grandparents' lives, especially in terms of how grandparents' lives differed from their own. I can't begin to catalog the varieties of hardship, violence, oppression, deprivation, and suffering that surfaced in these stories. In some cases the grandparents had long ago gone silent, taking their horrors with them. 

    I have no personal experience that even remotely compares, yet my heart was and is battered over and over again. How could it not be so?

    Other countries I have lived in or visited -- China, Russia, Egypt, France, the UK, even my own country, the US -- bear the scars of war in visible ways. I have visited battlefields and memorials. I have read accounts. I have seen photographs. I have friends whose lives have been damaged by combat in wars during my own lifetime. I have pieced together comments and observations from many sources. Sometimes there is chest-thumping and the self-congratulation.  Official histories can read that way; the old adage that victors write the histories is true enough. Sometimes, the accounts call for vengeance; they-did-it-first finger-pointing, calls for retaliation and retribution frequently underlay these arguments instead of clear-eyed reasoning. Truth-telling, capital "T" Truth, is usually a first casualty.

    While it may be true that some few wars are actually necessary, the UN defense of South Korea being one perhaps, no war is a good war, a clean war. We visited the UN Cemetery in Busan while we were there. Twice, in fact. It had the same sobering, heart-wrenching effect on me as our visit to the American Cemetery in Normandy in October 2018.

 

 

 

    Objectively, all wars produce a common set of facts: soldiers die, civilians die, babies and old people die, cities are destroyed, lives are ruined, traditions and ways of life are obliterated, farmland is rendered toxic with landmines and other residue from the war effort. And everyone, civilians especially, pays an extraordinary price in suffering.

    All of my observations lead me to this question: If war is so universally reprehensible and its punishments so widely catastrophic, why is the alternative, peace, such a hard idea to grasp? 

    This is not a moment for finger pointing nor for posturing -- neither will bring an end to killing and suffering. To state it differently, does it really surprise anyone that the current war in the middle east is intractable if the starting point for both sides is annihilation of the other? The same question can be asked of other violent conflicts, as even partisans should know. Surely, there is enough blame to go around to account for the present state of our troubled world. None of us can claim absolutely to have clean hands.  

    Isn't our troubled world the same world mentioned in the first phrase of John 3:16 -- this world that God loved so, so much that he intervened in human history? Why is it so hard to understand that strength, power -- whatever its forms -- comes with enormous responsibilities? Or that peace require we step into the breach, as it were -- that we become agents of peace?

    Why do we find it easier to build bunkers and shroud them with barbed wire to protect our "security" than to put on kindness, generosity, compassion, understanding -- to allow ourselves to be vulnerable for the sake of the common good? Why do we frame our positions in terms of abstractions and absolutes, ensuring war remains inevitable and intractable?

    For those of us who identify as Christian: why do we insist on practicing our faith selectively? Why do we pick and choose from Scripture what seems to support our position, especially in the political arena, and ignore the weightier matters of mercy and justice and faithfulness? Why are we so quick to draw an absolute line between I and we? between us and them? 

    Unless we value ceremonies in the military cemeteries over lives of preventable suffering in our own time, we need to take responsibility. We who so eagerly and quickly embrace grace for ourselves are called out when we cruelly deny it to others. If we excuse that behavior, shame on us. Shame on me. Shame on you. Shame on all of us.