Focus on the Future and Not the Past
Here is a great editorial in the Chosun Ilbo about the need for Korea’s government to look towards the future instead of the past:
Yet today, only two of the Northeast Asian nations that were not so long ago vying to emerge from their historic backwater are competing at the center of world history. China is bracing itself to provide a counterbalance to the U.S., and Japan envisages a policy of reining in China’s regional hegemony in alliance with America. The U.S., meanwhile, has embraced Japan to employ a dual strategy of restraining and cooperating with China.
What the three powers have in common is that Korea hardly figures on their map. They discuss it only when they are talking about struggling North Korea, a country caged in pre-modern failure but trying to embrace the bane of modernity, nuclear weapons.
No matter that we have progressed in leaps and bounds, we have been erased from their minds. A mere 15 years ago, Deng Xiaoping told his people to learn from South Korea; now China barely gives us a second thought.
It only took a few years for that to happen. “I will not be concerned at other men’s not knowing me,” says Confucius. “I will be concerned at my own want of ability.†And it has been Korea’s want of ability that in the last few years has made it drop out of the future-bound race among the three Northeast Asian neighbors, where one led one moment and another the next, and retreated into the past. It is our leaders we have to thank for this, with their insistence that we can only have a future if we right the wrongs of the past, and their refusal to brook any debate whether that is true.
I feel this country is hungry for some leadership and I hope the next presidential election provides it. The leftists pursuit of rewriting the past without focusing on the future of the country may very well cause Korea to forever be in the past as the rest of Asia passes this country by.
