Voice Post: On Korean Unification

As a lazy, stereotypical 21^st century human being, I rarely go beyond Page 2 in a search engine to look for, well, anything (referencing to a certain “Is Google Making Us Stupid” post I had a chance to read in class). For this particular assignment, however, I had to go way beyond the usual limits of my attention span, mainly because it was so hard to find a non-journalistic blog entry written by a non-professional. I finally came across this amateur blogger, an American who lived in Korea for two years during which he married his Korean wife. Although the blog as a whole is simply a compilation of his daily thoughts, there was a particular post titled “On Korean Unification” that struck my interest.

Before going into detail of what his “voice” entails, it is important to mark the note at the bottom of the post that says “This was written for a job application.” As a result, his tone throughout this post is more formal than those of his other posts. He clearly paid more attention to his grammar and word choices than he normally would, which produced a post that was full of highly academic vocabularies and clean transitions. In comparison to his personal blog post titled “On Contentment, Part II,” which details his hardships over the past few years struggling with financial and family issues, this particular post has a very specific main idea and other metaphors and supporting evidences in a more structured order rather than “writing whatever comes to mind.”

It is interesting to see him using the pronoun “we” from beginning to end, as if he were part of the group being affected by the unification. He of course writes from the South Korean perspective, probably due to his experience in the country and his wife’s origin, and he takes a very strong stance against North Korea’s “overreacting” and “absurd demands.” He is very sympathetic towards the South Korean government, which he believes to have paid “gratuitous financial investments” for the purpose of “reaching out for the sake of reunification.” His attitude towards their conflict is similar to that of a family friend looking at a nasty marriage; concerned and troubled by his friends’ hardships, he tries his best to offer the most peaceful solution.

Indeed, he uses the marriage metaphor to a great degree to portray the relationship between South Korea and North Korea. “Many have friends in abusive, or otherwise dysfunctional relationships,” he says, “the reality of the relationship is that of a marriage in the 1950s: divorce is no solution, nor would it be advisable for the emotionally unstable children of the North.” He approaches the issue a bit cautiously in the beginning by simply sweeping over the general background of the situation with broad word choices (“normalcy,” “typical”, “cyclical”, etc.), but as he gets into the whole marriage notion, his inner “fatherness” comes to play as his voice grows increasingly firm on anti-divorce.

His ultimate solution for the troubling couple is to “take the moral high ground,” which is stated in an exceedingly idealistic manner. “Military preparedness and technological superiority must remain a priority, but in the end, a heart ready to make wrongs right, and ears primed for dialogue must always be offered,” he argues. While it may appear to be a simple communication problem when compared to the marriage analogy, this is a political issue that involves military actions, world-scale power shift, weapons and thousands of innocent citizens. His voice is very hopeful and naive, an attitude that tends to be frequently seen amongst political idealists who apply the most basic rules of communication to any level of conflict.

In the end, he finishes the article on a strong note by declaring that “making South Korea an island” will never be a sensible solution, and only a true compromise will make reunification take place. “Why, then must we seek to be right at the expense of our marriage to maintain a false position of strength and superiority?” he ends with a rhetorical question to which he has already given an obvious answer in order to make us re-think about what we believe to be right and wrong.

Overall, his emotions shift from sympathy towards South Korea and abhorrence towards North Korea to a high degree of hope later on. He definitely seems like an idealist, someone who likes to simplify matters into comprehensible analogies in order to make sense out of an otherwise complicated situation. While his views are definitely helpful in making us re-evaluate what ideals we are trying to protect by fighting for our own rights, his advice seems a little too general and impractical for current issues involving nuclear weapons and international politics.