Dr. Scott Shepherd is a British-American academic. He received his Ph.D. from the University of London on the text and performance of Hamlet, and has taught in universities in the U.K. and Korea.
Pandemic makes me reflect, repent and realize it is time to act
Volunteer Fatima Sanson, dressed up as Mrs. Claus, embraces a needy child in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais State, Brazil, Dec. 7, 2020. AFP
By Scott Shepherd
By Scott Shepherd
Christmas is fast approaching and across the world the merry jingle of Christmas songs can be heard in homes and the few public spaces still open. I love this time of year and for weeks I've been happily playing carols at every opportunity. Yet for some reason this year, a line from one festive song in particular has just been going round and round my head.
The line is from the annoyingly catchy Band Aid hit “Do they know it's Christmas?” It was originally released in 1984 and featured a number of pop singers led by Bob Geldof. The 1984 version raised money for victims of the famine in Ethiopia that year; it has since gone through several iterations, most recently in 2014.
Poetically speaking, most of the song's lyrics are ― and I don't want to get too technical here ― awful, to use the correct literary term. Indeed, the song has been subject to plenty of criticism, much of which holds a great deal of water. Frankly, when I started writing this article, I didn't really mind the song too much, but over the course of writing this, I've grown to hate the song more and more.
But there's one line I just can't stop thinking about: “Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you.”
In a song subject to so much criticism, this line stands out as one that has attracted particularly strong ire. Detractors see it as smug and heartless; they see it as suggesting that we should be glad that others are suffering instead of us: “as long as I'm ok, who cares about everyone else?”
But I can't help thinking that this is by far the most honest and moving line in the whole song ― and probably in the whole cheesy canon of Christmas pop songs. It seems to me that the line's critics have misunderstood it, or at least interpreted it very ungenerously.
I see the line as a reminder of how easily any one of us could find ourselves in an awful situation. Given how lucky we are, how easily we could be the ones suffering, the line prompts us to be grateful for what we have. If this year has done nothing else, it's helped us realize that the little sandcastles of our lives aren't quite as stable as we thought, and a sudden wave can bring everything crashing down at any moment.
There's nothing different about me that means I can't suffer the same tragedies as anyone else, and I ought to be grateful for my situation. I live peacefully and comfortably with my wife in our little home, and I've been able to keep working during this pandemic.
Yet this year has been unrelentingly miserable for so many. To be honest, I can't stop thinking about it. And that line just keeps going round and round my head: “thank God it's them instead of you.”
At the last count, the pandemic has killed more than 1.5 million people. That is a staggering amount which is far beyond the ken of the human brain. It's just an unfathomably huge number. And each person making up that impersonal statistic had plans and loves and secrets and ambitions and regrets. Every single one of those deaths is a tragedy. And there are just so many of them, too many to comprehend.
And even on top of the direct anguish of the deaths the virus has caused, the pain of all the lockdowns and restrictions has been felt keenly across the world. Economies and lives alike have been subject to huge disruption. Businesses are closed, families torn apart, hopes and dreams frustrated.
The year's woes have not just been caused by the virus, either: an enormous blast shook the Lebanese capital; fake news seems more prevalent than ever; the USA continues to reel from division and hatred; the Uighur people continue to have their culture eroded.
Furthermore, 2020 has seen its share of armed conflict: June saw brutal clashes between India and China; Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a war, and Ethiopian federal troops waged a brief civil war against Tigrayan regional troops. The civil war in Yemen continues, and the conflict between Anglophones and Francophones in the Cameroon is still ongoing, and so on and so on and so on. More war, more death, more tragedy.
With some exceptions, Korea itself has been spared much actual violence, though there has been plenty of other kinds of suffering this year.
So why am I living in such comfort? Why aren't I suffering like so many others are? I don't know. The world has so many problems that it can feel hard to cope just thinking about them: what can I do? What can anyone do?
And so as I think about the lyrically-challenged Band Aid song, I have to acknowledge that at least its writers and singers were doing something.
However many stilted lines they wrote, however “unwoke” they were, they were really trying to make a difference. We can, of course, argue about the effectiveness of the aid given: I've seen plenty of people dismissing the song by claiming that the money raise by the charity single's work was ineffective. I'm a huge fan of doing charity properly, but I can't help feeling that a lot of the criticism is just a smokescreen covering the critics' own inaction.
While I don't really know what I can do to solve the world's problems, I know in my heart of hearts that I've done very little to really make a change for the good of anyone outside of my own circle.
It's my duty as a Christian and as a human to give help to the suffering. I know it is, and I've always known. Yet I've neglected to do so. I want to change that, so I'm going to spend a lot of time this month reflecting. Although I have little power or influence, I do have this column and this is my start. The Korea Times, as the country's oldest English-language paper, is read by powerful and influential people. I hope some of this column's readers, too, can spend the winter thinking. The line “thank God it's them instead of you” is, in my mind at least, followed by an implicit call to action: thank God and then try to do something about it.
Dr. Scott Shepherd is a British-American academic. He has taught in universities in the U.K. and Korea, and is currently Assistant Professor of English at Chongshin University, Seoul. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.