::A Geek in Korea::

Like any political debate in Korea, eventually the stupid rhetoric reaches students in my school and I’ve got to waste time dealing with whatever warped version of reality has sunk into these children’s head. One mouth-breathing student asked me if I lived in America. He asked it coyly, like he was springing a trap on me. I was about 10 steps ahead at this point.  I answered, “Yeah, I’m from the United States. I walk to Korea every day. What do you THINK?”

“Do YOU eat CRAZY COW?! HA HA HA!” was his reply. Oh, zing, he sure got me.

This boy spends about 90% of his life playing video games and not studying. The fact that he had been exposed to the OMG-CRAZY COW Internet rumors was nothing surprising to me. He also doesn’t have any person acting as a filter for his Internet exposure, telling him truth from fiction.

If I may drop my political agnosticism for a moment, I am of the opinion that the same people that were protesting the Korea-USA Free Trade Agreement are the same people that are desperately hoping that the resumption of shipments of American beef into Korea can be hijacked into a referendum about the treaty since the beef is a precondition for the rest of the deal to proceed.

The last administration accomplished agreeing to the treaty with the thinnest of margins by stifling dissent. The issue has now been reopened, and Korean farmers have one last desperate attempt to stop the tide before competitive measures start to erode their hold on the economy. This crowd is largely xenophobic, and will use nationalism at the drop of a hat to justify any position. Spreading rumors to the impressionable set to mobilize the press into publishing stories about how American beef will melt your brain isn’t below them. Daring the president to eat beef as if Lee Myeong Bak’s head would explode like a dude from Scanners is dumb.

I don’t care, one way or another, if they let American beef into Korea. I think that using lies to delude children in an attempt to subvert a treaty is despicable. So, thanks to some of the beef facts I learned from ZenKimchi, I tore into this whole rumor and really dropped some knowledge. If they were going to waste my time, I wanted to quash it once, in a proper fashion with a debate.

Sadly, when talking to elementary school students, the debate IS going to be a little on sided. I don’t think they had heard the entire “other side” of the issue once. I basically got them to agree that Korean beef isn’t going to be THAT much safer than American beef since they don’t even check it for Mad Cow disease.

They also agreed that as long as American beef is checked and is safe, it could be allowed in. Most of the students said that they would prefer Korean beef to American beef, which I said was entirely within the rules of the FTA. Allowing American beef into Korea didn’t mean that no one could eat locally grown beef.It’s more socially responsible to eat locally anyway, but Korea doesn’t have enough meat to go around, thus the need to import.

Basically, the risks of American beef had been GREATLY overstated, and the superiority of Korean beef had been equated to nationalism, racial superiority, and cultural identity. This is the same thing that happens EVERY time there is ANY debate with international entities requiring a change in Korea. People hijack the debate and turn it into a referrendum about loving their country more than loving foreingers. It’s counter productive and always ends poorly for everyone invovled. This is one of the downsides of a mono-culture. I’ve been around for a few of these issues, and I usually ride out the tide with only a few snarky comments from students. This time, at least, people were willing to conceed some of the points.