Game changer

By Jin In-hwi

Let’s face it. Being a university student implies nothing more than the tuition paid. We just cannot find a better way to spend 30 million won in four years.

We have heard there were times when university students were superheroes. The students had fought against social injustice, most of them together! The dictators kidnapped, tortured and even killed those students, but couldn’t make them surrender! All for the sake of this country, we’ve heard.

No thanks. Not anymore. As a university student, I admit there is nothing heroic in us. We do not read Marx. We read self-help books. We do not want to save this country. We must save ourselves first. We are selfish, and give not a damn about the world.

Perhaps the most serious concern that we share, the only one to be exact, would be deciding what to eat for lunch. Taste for food distinguishes this generation. Look at the fuss we make about eating! We jokingly call fried chicken our religion, along with its advocated beer. As the lunch hour nears, we meticulously ponder over possible options. Italian or Indian? Cafeteria or franchise restaurant?

We think about food, take pictures of food, eat food, with due respect, talk about food while eating, and then post about food in our blogs. I am not being critical. I can come up with hundreds of reasons why picking our lunch menu matters more to us than politics does.

The food business has treated us better than politics has, for one. The restaurants have asked what we would like, and even better, we received what we asked for. In the few cases they have mistreated us, we expressed disappointment and saw the problems fixed. If food tastes terrible and prices are high, a restaurant will go out of business for sure.

How has politics treated us, then? Well, quite the opposite. We find ourselves stuck with two or more major parties that essentially serve the same old thing. They constantly change their names but never their character. If we take a look at their menu, what they call campaign pledges, we find nothing is appealing.

Not ordering, I guess, was how we have responded so far. They have taught us not to make a scene. We politely decided to skip a meal, but we kept getting these bitter tasting crabs on the table that we did not order. We do not know why. We never asked for the world’s second highest university tuition, an unstable job market and harsh work conditions.

We did not. Now we wonder if our responses were wrong from the start. Maybe we should have ordered something, anything, comparably better than this. If it is between crabby tasting food and crabby tasting crab, we should have chosen the former. Then we would have gotten something edible at least.

What I like about this parallelism is that we must constantly eat to survive. We have to make political decisions every minute. Not participating in a demonstration, not voting and not voicing are all decisions, and apparently those decisions have accumulated to this mess.

No decision, however, is permanent. We can eat a different dish each lunch. We can start ordering our favorite cuisine, even if it is not on the menu. We can ask for what politics does not offer. Who knows? They may serve it someday.

Older generations tell us to take politics seriously. They mean well, but I do not agree with them. Taking a political stance is just like picking out a lunch menu, and just as natural and fundamental. After all, the bills show that we are paying for our own meal in both cases. We should be careful what we order.

The writer is a sophomore majoring in English language at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. She can be reached at jininhwi@gmail.com.