generalizations

At the risk of turning this blog into a status update, here's my 4th post in as many days. I bet you can't believe your luck.


Let's recap last night. Those drunks were out there for a while before I even fully woke up. It was one of those situations where you keep waking up again and again, but you never snap out of that hypnopompic state and realize why you keep waking up. Then, once I did realize what was waking me up, at about 3am, I tried to ignore it, but it just continued. Then I began writing about it here, which lead to me eventually yelling at them to "shut the fuck up," I believe.

It went on for longer after I stopped writing. In time, someone scraped the fat guy up off the pavement and, I don't know, maybe dismembered him and carried him away bit by bit. One of the pugilists slinked away and was never heard from again. Presumably he found other people to awaken and annoy. Which left us one solitary figure, slouched against the curb, yelling at no one. That continued until the first streaks of dawn cut across the sky, at which point I imagine he vanished into thin air and returned home to his wife, Akhlys.

In the midst of all this, I had some harsh words for Korea, and Koreans. I regret those words. Let's look at the facts: there are 50,000,000 South Koreans, and 3 of them, or 0.00000006% of the population, were keeping me awake. To disparage an entire populace because of those three, debased pariahs is lazy of me, and borne out of a mixture of anger and sleepiness.

If there's one thing that living in Korea has taught me, it's to disdain generalizations, because I understand the other side of it. Just last weekend I was eating dinner at a restaurant with a friend. It was in a busy part of town, and the restaurant was crowded. On the other side of the restaurant there was a table of about 8 other expats. Not long after we sat down to eat did it become evident that one guy in particular at this other table was quite intoxicated. He began standing up at his table, and yelling belligerently. He got louder and louder until everyone in the restaurant was staring at him. He and his dipshit friends thought it was hysterical, and they continued getting more and more drunk and obnoxious. Meanwhile, my friend and I sat mortified, and slinked further into the corner hoping to be undetected.

I cannot put into words the feeling of shame and embarrassment I feel when that kind of thing happens. It ruins my night. It shouldn't, but it does, and the reason is that I know that some people in that restaurant, having had to put up with that bullshit, are now going to paint me and every other foreigner with the same brush they do that table of scumbags. I even pulled our waiter aside and apologized for the other table, to hopefully redeem my race in at least one person's eyes. But I couldn't go table to table and do that to each person there, because, well, that'd be crazy, and besides I was really hungry.

As much as I hate being characterized in the same vein as the people at that other table, I know that in the eyes of some people at the restaurant, I will be. And I don't mean to excuse those people who will make that generalization; it's just as lazy of them to do it as it is of me. But people love to find reasons to dismiss or disregard other people, especially those who don't look the same as them.

So it stops here with me right now. I'm not taking part in the cycle of generalization and prejudice. Korea, I want you to listen to me: I'm sorry for what I said, and I promise that in the future, I won't use the worst of you to judge the rest of you.

But that shit better not happen again tonight.