Nostalgia often leads us to exclaim, “Ah, those good old days!” Yet as I grow older, the sweet memories of my past seem to fall from my mind, leaving behind only regrettable memories to haunt me instead.
Frequently, I murmur to myself, “I should (or shouldn’t) have done it.” My regrets come to a head when someone dear passes away, robbing me of the chance to correct my mistakes.
Whenever that happens, I ask myself, “Why did I do that to him?” Nevertheless, I keep committing the same mistakes. I guess I am only human.
Scientists say that animals, once they have made a mistake and suffered the consequences, never make the same mistake again. But humans are different. Even after learning a bitter lesson, humans will still make the same blunder.
Experts assert that this is not because humans are incorrigibly stupid, but because it is human nature to repeat the same follies. That is to say, even when something went wrong in the past, humans tend to hope that it may be different this time. Unlike animals, which never believe in such luck, humans naively hope to see a different outcome.
That is why we repeatedly make the same errors even though we are well aware of the consequences. Each time, however, the outcome is the same and we are disappointed and frustrated. Then we utter regrettably, “I should’ve known!” or “I knew it!”
When the tragic accident of the ill-fated Sewol ferry broke our hearts six months ago, we strongly hoped that Korea would act swiftly to ensure we never faced the same tragedy again. We hoped Korea would transform into a country where we could raise our children safely and count on our transportation system for worry-free travel.
We prayed that South Korea would undergo drastic social reform to build a better, safer society where corruption would not be tolerated. Otherwise, how could we possibly live with the fact that those innocent young students drowned because of the coastguard’s incompetence, the ineffective chain-of-command in government and the maritime company’s blind greed?
Instead, we have witnessed the opposite phenomenon for the past six months. Angry parents of the victims boycotted the agreement reached by the leaders of the National Assembly and consequently paralyzed the government until recently. Some of them became violent and beat up a substitute driver and passersby.
Surely, not all of the grieving parents approved of the extreme measures of their leaders. Presumably, the innate problem was the presence of political activists who used the leaders of the bereaved families to try to sabotage the government. These radicals, hiding behind the scenes, maliciously exploited the victims’ sorrow for political gain and turned the tragedy into a political issue to topple the government.
A few days ago, I met Lee O-young, a former minister of culture, who remarked, “It would have been better if the bereaved families had mourned silently and the public had protested for them instead.
“If we insist the president assume responsibility for everything, we will unwittingly end up inviting dictatorship. That’s not what we want.”
I could not agree with him more. When we look back upon 2014 someday, we will be filled with regret. We will say, “We shouldn’t have done it at that time.”
Lee added, “The opposition party members seem to assume that they are the only ones who are aggrieved about the victims of the ferry accident. But that’s not true. The ruling party members are distressed as well. In fact, everybody is grief-stricken in Korea. Who wouldn’t be?” Fortunately, the government and the opposition finally reached an agreement and the National Assembly got back to business.
Another thing we do not want to regret later is the precarious balance of our diplomacy with China and the United States. If we choose the wrong side, we will inevitably regret it in the near future, but by then it will be too late. What is done cannot be undone.
Then there is our fateful relationship with Japan. In Korea, conservatives call progressives “pro-North Korea radicals,” and progressives return the compliment by calling conservatives “pro-Japan traitors.” Amid the conflicts, both internal and external, our diplomacy is doomed to be precarious.
When I was a child, right after the Korean War, adults taught us to be cynical. Using a rhyme in the Korean language, they would chant, “Don’t count on the United States, don’t be deceived by the Soviet Union and don’t forget that Japan will rise again.” Indeed, we can no longer depend solely on the United States these days as we watch both China and Japan rise again.
Despite this unprecedented international crisis, we are still hopelessly caught up in internal brawls and factional skirmishes. We do not have the luxury of regretfully saying, “We shouldn’t have done that,” or “We should’ve known.”
By Kim Seong-kon
Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute. ― Ed.
