What is to be done less than a week after Halloween tragedy?

By Michael Breen

A mourner lays flowers at a makeshift memorial for the victims of the deadly Halloween crowd surge, outside a subway station in the district of Itaewon in Seoul, Monday. /AFP-Yonhap

The tragedy in Itaewon at the weekend, when 156 people died, crushed in that alley alongside the Hamilton Hotel, will remain in the memory for as long as we live.

As older people are reminded, passing the Daeyongak building in downtown Seoul, of the fire there on Christmas Day 1971, when it was a hotel and 164 died ― some of them diving through the smoke from their windows on mattresses ― so the site of last Saturday's disaster will be pointed out for decades to come.

Almost certainly, the alley will disappear, just as the hotel did (although the owners for some reason kept the name for the building). But we will remember.

But now, less than a week on, where are we with this and what is to be done?

At this stage, all eyes are on the police, government and national leadership. We expect two things. One is compassion. The other is direction.

We want the suffering and sadness acknowledged and articulated. There is a certain competence required of political and social leaders to that end, and, as we saw with the Sewol ferry tragedy in 2014, it's not always there.

When I say we also need direction, I am referring to the more familiar form of competence. That is, we want the leaders to do their jobs. They must quickly take charge, accept responsibility, assess what happened and why, and take whatever steps are necessary.

These two competencies in leaders, for compassion and direction, come from the moral objective of the job which is to serve the citizenry. As everyone understands well, this serving of the people can be faked to a point, but then in a crisis, motives get exposed.

For example, when leaders are defensive and pass the buck, even with justification, they signal that their job security takes precedence over the suffering being dealt with.

Similarly, I would say, that when those who are not in power, but think they should be, use a tragedy of this sort to pull down their opponents, even with justification, they signal precisely the same lack of virtue. And our response is to wish for better leaders on both sides.

I should say that we are so used to this that we are somewhat cynical and often don't give leaders a chance. But, like him or not, President Yoon Suk-yeol so far is showing competence in both the compassionate and policy action sense.

It does occur to me that many among us, particularly journalists who, like emergency workers, may flick off their compassion switches in order to dispassionately probe and find stuff out and write it up all under pressure, see life in terms of power relations.

Hence all those stories, within one short news cycle of a tragedy, about what seems most important ― whether this will hurt the popularity of the fellow in power. That fact is that we, the readers, don't care about that. We may come to, of course.

But, generally, I would say at times like this, the eyes with which we view tragedy are love and they are blurred by tears. That said, the news analysis influences us and, who knows, a week from now, a million people may be on the street protesting against the president because something has turned up to warrant it.

As I say, the whole nation, including we foreign residents, look to leadership because we are in a collective and, along with 99.001 percent of people who we do not personally know, we are coming out of shock and sorrow, and mindful of where the real anguish lies ― with the families and friends of the victims.

In consideration of that, I must say as a parent, given that the victims were mostly young people dressing up and having fun, as my friends and I once did in that same place, and, as a man, given that so many of the dead were women, I feel at fault, as if there was something I didn't do.

A parent is supposed to provide a safe environment for the young. But I walk out of my house into a world I think I have no control over, moaning about government, sometimes even deluding myself that I am some kind of put-upon victim.

This mentality among we adults, who are wealthier and more educated than any of our forebears, this posing as victims, the willed passivity, is the height of intellectual fashion these days, especially for some perverse reason among Americans, the most powerful and privileged people in history.

But it is shameful, a pathetic abdication that brings on failure, even if it is simply in this case to not think to speak up about the danger of dense crowds because we've been in them and felt scared.

As for failure as a man, that it also to do with safety. As unfashionable as it may seem and regardless of whether some women object, men have an inbuilt sense to protect women. Or, if they don't, it's because another switch has been flicked off.

We saw that this year when young Ukrainian men walked their women and children to the border and turned back to fight. We see it in the absence, bar a few switched off types, of any demand by Korean men that women also do compulsory military service.

If men are so virtuous that none want Korean women to risk their lives in war, how was it then so many were squashed and trampled underfoot like this?

As you may see, these are unreasonable points on one level, but on another, they derive from a sense of regret that more is not done, not just by those in power, but by us all, with what power we have. As we expect government to act with imagination and competence, let us do so ourselves.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans."