Title: Sensitivity of Peace to Remember Pain
Contents
While watching the movie 'Repatriation' a while ago, I realized that I was gradually becoming insensitive to our division. The movie just showed it without any explanation, but throughout the movie, I had to remember the scars of the national animosity that lurk in our daily lives.
There were times when the wounds were exposed for a brief moment. It was like that when I silently confirmed the division ideology deeply engraved in friendly neighbors at every election, and the sea of tears that separated families swelled whenever they met each other. And right after the accident at Yongcheon Station, it was also the case when Hansi wasted time arranging opinions between the two Koreas over urgent relief items.
The mind has no such thing as a nation, but when the U.S. attacked Iraq last year, when the German chancellor and foreign minister rebelled against their powerful ally the U.S. and prevented them from falling back into folly, a sovereign nation I was really envious of those who did it first. For the first time since 1990, the German government, a federal republic, has courageously used its sovereignty in the face of barbaric injustice perpetrated by the powerful. After two world wars to which they were to blame and with devastating criminal consequences, they learned a lesson from history, though difficult.
It is said that the root of war is fear. In fact, the majority of people have been through wars without knowing why they happen, and in fact, wars often happen without any logical reason. However, it is said that it originally started from the fear of people, the fear of not being able to trust each other. So, if we build a wall between our own nature and the nature of others and insist that only our nature is right, that means we are already doing evil. So, people like Gandhi, King, and Dorothy Day, who practiced peace with non-resistance and thorough non-violence, seem to have said that the inner change that human beings return to the right mind and heart is the way to achieve peace on earth.
Then it seems that the way we, ordinary people, make peace is a little easier than for those who are called to take a method of resistance that can lead to imprisonment, injury or even death. By working, giving oneself to others, responding sensitively to non-peaceful social environments, and by embracing rather than excluding others, believing in the possibility that others can be liberated from any form of violence, they are fully armed from the inside out. Isn't that the very way to release it, perhaps the first step on a long journey to practice the great slogan of peace for mankind?
Even those who still think that the National Security Act is a law that makes our lives in the south more secure, our deformed body, the only one left on the planet with one body and two heads, will be heartbreaking. So, looking at the children of Yongcheon, they must have wanted to give anything. South to South and North to North Even those who believe that living as we are now means that we are economically stable, may also want to find beauty in the destitute and dull streets of North Korea. It is only the desire to save the northern streets, where the beauty of everyday life, where rice water boils here and there, the smell of food vibrates in the streets, and dandelions and violets bloom, one day soon becomes ashes.
I really hope that this kind of earnestness can be an unexpected opportunity. So, like Germany, we would like to use the sovereignty of a unified government to shout unconditional opposition to any future wars and unconditional support for peace.
Now we are barely rolling the rock up the mountain. No one knows when it will be placed on top of the mountain or when it will roll down again. But as long as our sensibilities who have experienced pain are open to peace, we will continue to roll it up the mountain. Remembering the words of St. Catherine of Siena, "All roads to heaven are heaven"...