America's Sewol moment

By John Burton

Weeping children. Distraught parents. Those images have played across American cable news channels over the last two weeks following the shooting at a Florida high school that killed 14 students and three teachers. It also brought back memories of the emotional scenes we saw on Korean television in the wake of the sinking of the ferry Sewol in 2014 that killed 304 people, most of them high school students and teachers.

The Sewol sinking was the biggest tragedy in Korea’s recent history and it would have profound political ramifications, starting a chain of events that would lead to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye in 2017. The shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school also carries with it possible political consequences, including growing public demand for a clampdown on America’s lax gun laws.

The common ingredient that unites both events is that high school students were at the center of both tragedies and that factor may explain why both events have had such a strong emotional impact.

Americans are still puzzled why the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school has triggered such a forceful response against guns when there have been other mass shootings in recent years that have taken higher death tolls. Only last year, a gunman killed 58 people attending a concert in Las Vegas in the biggest mass shooting in U.S. history. In 2016, 49 people were killed at the Pulse nightclub in Florida.

Moreover, it is by no means the only mass shooting that has occurred at a U.S. school. A Korean-American student killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, while 26 students and staff died at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.

Although all these previous shootings immediately led to demands for tougher gun laws, momentum for reforms soon faded away. The composition of the targets may explain why that happened. The victims of the Las Vegas and Pulse shootings involved a disparate group of people with little connection to each other and thus hampered a united response from survivors.

Although the killing of young children at Sandy Hook was so horrific that it made President Barack Obama publicly weep and led the parents of the victims to mount an anti-gun campaign, the school’s small size hindered a sustained effort. On the other hand, the large size of Virginia Tech with more than 30,000 students blunted the long-term impact of the shooting there.

In contrast, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School consists of a close-knit body of around 3,000 students, which appears to be an optimum size to organize the expression of collective rage. It helps that the high school is among Florida’s top 10 percent in terms of academic ranking. The student leaders who have organized their anti-gun #NeverAgain movement are articulate and media-savvy, which reflects the legacy of the person after whom the school is named, a pioneering female journalist who campaigned for the preservation of the Florida Everglades.

It was likewise the response of the parents and students at the 1,500-strong Danwon High School in Ansan City, most of whose junior class died in the Sewol sinking, that marked the beginning of the end of the Park administration.

The families of Sewol victims set up protest tents in Gwanghwamun to demand an official investigation into the government’s incompetent rescue efforts and called for officials to be held accountable. They also adopted the yellow ribbon as a symbol of remembrance.

Although their persistent campaign to seek justice began to fade from public consciousness as time went on, it took on renewed vigor when the “Choigate” corruption scandal was revealed in October 2016. Their protest site on Gwanghwamun became the center of the Candlelight Revolution against Park and the yellow ribbon was adapted as a sign of government opposition.

Just as American students are complaining that they are fed up with practicing routine active-shooter drills at their schools because the frequency of school shootings has become the norm, Korean students responded angrily to the corruption and ineptitude of their elders that led to the Sewol disaster. They became the “Sewol Generation.”

The Sewol tragedy contributed to the political awakening of Korean youth, who had been previously been criticized for being apathetic. Many students would draw link between the Sewol, Choigate and their complaints about “Hell Joseon” and they played a key role in the Candlelight movement,

Whether the #NeverAgain movement will have the same effect remains uncertain. An estimated half a million people are expected to participate in its planned “March for Our Lives” in Washington, D.C. on March 24. The most interesting question may not be whether the students’ movement will lead to tougher gun laws, but rather if it will lay the foundation for an even bigger protest movement against the Trump administration which is viewed as being just as incompetent as the Park government once was.

John Burton (johnburtonft@yahoo.com), a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and consultant.