man vs. man

i've been watching with a sort of disconnected fascination as protests have rocked seoul for the past month or so, the issue being, ostensibly, the importation of american beef.
i've watched as korean boys, nineteen, in navy blue uniforms and police badges have lined up nervously with barricades and guns, performing their mandatory civil service -
or as droves of impassioned college students have gathered in circles with banners and heated cries, decrying the four month tenure of the current korean party as authoritarian and anti-korean -
or as the korean president, lee myung-bak, has bowed in frightened humility as his entire cabinet threatens to resign.


perhaps this is an old story. protests aren't exactly rare in a country that has witnessed masses of political upheaval in the past half-century since the korean war (not to mention the japanese occupation for the half-century before, where my grandfather was given a japanese name and forbidden to speak korean in public). neither are protests or anti-american sentiment or political unrest in general rare in a world that is as consistently turbulent as ours. sure, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathering in the largest south korean demonstration in twenty years can make the cover of today's new york times, but the paper is littered with references to countless other occurences rooted in historical turmoil.
i remember my dad reading me an article in the economist about the sudan when i was nine or so. absolutely aghast, i finally responded, "that's so rude."
"rude?!" my dad laughed. "isn't that a bit of an understatement?"
yes, but isn't any response a bit of an understatement?

i suppose that i am asking, in this vague and wandering soliloquy, what is our connection to all of this? what is it that we can do when suddenly we feel so small, or are even blinded to the grossest injustices by our inevitable clouds of inner turmoil? so many of us are in that nebulous land called being twenty-something, trying to figure out what we want to do with our lives or even tomorrow. i waver between a constant bout of feeling too much and feeling too little. between throwing myself as fully into activism as i can (which often turns more into a cry for "awareness") and not being able to read the paper because it depresses me too much. i suppose it is in this time that we make the decision, as much as ever, for what kind of person we want to be. what kind of connection we want to make to the humanity that we belong to - whether that be with our next-door neighbor we still can't remember the name of or a milieu of "popular" causes.

for me, the korean protests are just part one of a thousand dealing with my current pursuit of identity. does being korean involve picking a side between nationalistic fervor and economic partisanship? does being human involve learning to separate yourself from your ingrown (read: familial) biases in order to entangle yourself with the world and sincerely and passionately dedicate yourself to your individually grown beliefs?