J. D. Pendry

J. D. Pendry

I just returned from a two-week trip to Korea. My jets are still lagging, which might explain why I was wide-awake at 0300. If my jet lag runs its typical course, I should be sleeping soundly somewhere mid-sermon.

Korea is an interesting place and an interesting lesson. My history there goes back to 1972 when I was an Army Private in I Corps stationed at Camp Red Cloud in Uijongbu, Korea. Uijongbu is just down the road a piece from communist North Korea and the world’s most heavily fortified and defended border along the 38th latitudinal parallel north, which if your curious about such things also passes through Wild Wonderful West Virginia where I sit this early Sunday morning. Although today’s average public school product probably could not tell you this, the Korean War never ended officially. There exists only a cease-fire. In 1972, dirt streets and roads were common to many areas. Most Koreans had neither a telephone nor a car. Women wading through the flooded paddies mostly planted rice by hand. In the countryside, thatched roofs were common and many rural areas still had no electricity.

If you visited Korea for the first time in 2008, you would find it hard to believe how far the country has advanced in 35 years. Broadband Internet is everywhere and traveling in many places via fiber optic cable at speeds that would absolutely dazzle the average American Internet user. The electronics industry is booming – Samsung and LG ring any bells for you? Attached to their cell phones and Ipods, Korean teenagers are much like their American counterparts. New cars and SUVs clog the streets that were once mostly filled with tiny little taxi cabs that the GIs called Kimchi Cabs – Hyundai, Kia, Daewoo and many BMWs, Mercedes, and Lexus, an occasional Porsche, but not too many American models unless imported and driven by an American military person or a US government employee. Gone are the once common man-pulled carts and A-frames, although the delivery boys (once called chogi boys by the GIs - chogi is Korenglish for go there) on their scooters and motorbikes dangerously darting through traffic are still present. The standard living quarters for a Korean family is a very modern apartment in a high-rise apartment complex, the more elaborate of them depending on the location costing upwards of a million dollars or more. Brick and framed homes, many of them of a western design replaced those thatched roofed farmhouses.

Along with my wife, sitting in a pastry shop in the Itaewon area of Seoul called the Paris Baguette, sipping my Café Americano and eating cheesecake I could see through the window a Dunkin Donuts, Quisnos, Subway, KFC, Starbucks, MacDonald’s and an Outback Steakhouse intermingled with the Korean restaurants and shops. Young Koreans have grown up, as have most Americans, in a land of plenty and living the good life. In the agricultural areas, farm help is hard to come by and immigrant farm workers are becoming common. The large farm that has been in my wife’s family for generations, and now ran by a nephew, has a difficult time finding labor during planting and harvesting. Most young Koreans want to live and work in the large and congested metro areas, especially in Seoul. They are not interested in calloused hand farm work.

The older Korean people, those of my age group and older, have known great difficulties including a devastating war. Their time and experiences made them hard working, very socially and politically conservative and virulently anti-communist. Their hard work and perseverance built the modern and prosperous Korea that exists today. Many younger Koreans who have known wealth relative to the previous generations of Koreans and have inherited peace and prosperity, are becoming quite liberal and as so, in my opinion, a danger to their own existence.

Do you find anything eerily familiar here? In that short story, I could put America in the place of Korea and one could hardly tell the difference. The evolution of liberalism remains the same. The generation that comes through the difficult times builds a prosperous nation for the following generations. As the older generation leaves, so do their values, work ethic and sense of responsibility to the future of the country and to the following generations. Those who enjoy the peace and prosperity inherited through the hard work of past generations, begin to take it for granted. Relativism replaces God and social values, people avoid the dirty hands labor that built the country, politics becomes a wealth producing industry, movie actors and athletes replace true heroes, and education evolves into social indoctrination.

The country, once conservative, evolves into suicidal liberalism. Welcome to 2008 America.

Copyright © J D Pendry 2008 All Rights Reserved

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 12:37 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.