By Oh Young-jin
On Nov. 23, North Korea bombarded Yeonpyeong Island in the West Sea with a shower of artillery shells and rockets.
Two civilians and two members of the Marine detachment on the island were killed with many others injured. The neighborhood turned into rubble.
The footage of multiple plumes of smoke rising from the rubble was broadcast. Residents on evacuation boats talked about the horror of being under fire, not knowing whether they could make it alive.
Then, the South Korean public seethed with rage. Politicians angrily condemned Pyongyang's unprovoked attacks. North Korea argued through its official mouthpiece that it was South Korean military that started it all by shooting into its watcher during an exercise.
China took sides with the North, while the United States conducted a joint drill with its South Korean ally.
Does it all sound familiar?
By and large, this sequence of events followed the North's torpedoing of the South's frigate, Cheonan, in March, which killed 46 sailors.
It doesn't need clairvoyance to know that President Lee Myung-bak would address the nation and vow the next time the North won't go scot-free after a nationally-televised funeral for the killed (which already took place).
Then, we will forget about it and go back to business as usual, a development that will certainly follow in the matter of weeks, unless ...
Why can one be so sure? Because it has been proven time and again even before the Cheonan tragedy. When two Koreas were comparable in economic and military power, Seoul could afford to react more forcefully. Remember how the late dictator Park Chung-hee prepared a team of commandos whose mission was to assassinate key members of the Pyongyang leadership.
Then, as Seoul has grown wealthier, the edge of its responses has been blunted.
The new South Korean psychology is that "we have a lot more to lose than the North, if war break out again."
In that sense, President Lee spoke for many South Koreans, when he ordered
the military to restrain so as to prevent the Yeonpyeong situation from escalating into a full-blown war.
Of course, any leader with commonsense would know that such a remark at such a critical juncture can be tantamount to political suicide. Sometimes, the role of a leader is to express the courage that the public as well as himself are too scared to show.
Lee's instructions, however, reflected the public ambivalence shown right after the Yeonpyeong bombing.
Seoulites interviewed by The Korea Times on the night of the attack said that they were outraged but didn't want the situation to get out of hand. Interestingly, a street sweeper and a store clerk, who belong to a less privileged class, joined the call for a restrained response.
A closer examination of this ambivalence would show a deeply-rooted sense of hopelessness, which is similar to that of a rich kid being habitually beaten by a school bully, not being able to stand up or call for help.
In other words, the kid is accustomed to giving some pocket money to the bully in order to spare himself a beating. The bully keeps harassing the kid, now being secure in the knowledge that he can get away without being punished. Simply put, it is an everlasting vicious cycle.
Of course, this cycle can be broken in a happy ending like the one from a teenage comic book, when the harassed kid finally stands up and fights back the bully. Furthermore, the bully turns out to be not as strong as feared.
The point that the comic book often misses is how the weak kid summons his courage.
The comic book may cite a pretty girl's encouragement or shame he feels for being humiliated in front of her. We, South Koreans, need a reality check in order to overcome the fear about the bully in North Korea. This process can be started by "debunking" conventional thought that we have more to lose than the North.
Let's say that we have 100 dollars, while Pyongyang has 10 dollars. Psy 101 would say that the North's losing 10 dollars shouldn't be less painful than our losing 100 dollars. Perhaps, the situation could be more devastating to the North because their 10 dollars are concentrated on a few elites.
So the bottom line is that the two Koreas are locked in the situation of mutually assured destruction (MAD) of sorts, the original version of which had kept global peace in a nuclear equilibrium for decades throughout the Cold War era.
Thus, apply this lesson to the Korean situation and Seoul can feel fewer constraints in its use of force next time when the North stage unprovoked attacks. We can be as free to turn the gun sight and fire it as North Koreans.
The bigger point in this whole situation is about what message we are giving our children who will live in the post-unification era. Do we want them to cower and succumb to an act of injustice or do we want them to stand up and fight? The answer is too obvious to answer.