A Broken World

Oh, Korea, myth and memory, skeins of time and place, bright and yet dim in the years.

I see the two Sergeants Kim, my friends, sterling soldiers then in our Camp Hovey quonset hut – our hooch -- now old men like me, vaporized by the petty name-calling tumbled insanely into nuclear horror.

I see their children and grandchildren, the treasured generations, obliterated too in the flash and bolt, their last-seeing eyes wide and unbelieving.

I see the morning calm of the rolling hills and the smoothed mountains and the elegant paddies forever pierced with the spear of blinding and final light, never to be regained.

I see the people’s world there broken and forever fragile – at a whim of dark history and its blind and unthinking henchmen. I see the destruction of 51 million South Koreans and 20,000 American military, obliterated forever.

These visions come unbidden to me, their denial finally beyond my feeble reach, as, unbelieving, I watch and hear the insane clamor of men beyond any pale of conscience or morality. They are the specters of evil given flesh and voice, the incredible made eerily and perhaps fatally credible.

What has befallen us, why is the end of history no longer an academic concept but a precipice, real and yawning?

And yet, unrestrained, maddening, a slit-eyed varmint of unbridled self in the unprotected early morning casually hurls his venom at an equally unhinged cur of a despot, consequences be damned in his delirium of ego.

How can a common thief and grifter bring the end of time so close that people of seriousness and purpose mutter and imprecate, but little else stirs in the chaos of his arrogance? Political expedience has crushed courage from those charged with the welfare of an entire nation, and they are meek and yielding before his epic follies.

Will no one step forward when the survival of nations is at stake? Have politics Trumped patriotism? If there is history, what will it make of these waning days of democracy? Is the American empire, so-called, to be so short-lived?

And the people here, on these sad home shores, will they rally to their own defense, or will they turn back to their ubiquitous cable tellie and onerous “personal devices,” mesmerized still by the bright and shiny, but oblivious to the dark and threatening.

I think not. I hope not. We are at a critical crossroads of history, and those of courage and caring are stepping boldly forward, here and abroad, where similar despots are divesting their citizens of their hard-earned freedoms.

Will the true will of the people be heard again here, rising above the blind parroting of the terminally deluded? Will people of good will and lasting principles take decisive and necessary action, doing what must be done to ensure the very survival of a nation and, yes, a world, broken now in so many ways?