Imagine. You are disabled and you can’t speak for yourself. And the worst of all, you attend a school where teachers objectify-physically and sexually abuse-you, and the school administration covers it up. Still worse, some of your friends kill themselves, unable to handle the psychological damage. Yet, the court pronounces, “We found no mishaps among the accused teachers and therefore they should not be fired.”
This kind of horror could be appeared only in novels or in the movies. Nevertheless, it happened at Gwangju Inhwa School in Korea. The unimaginable crime and the miscarriage of justice rocked the whole nation when the story surfaced through the movie Dogani. Due to the success of the movie and the enraged public, the police reinvestigated the case, reluctantly.
A similar cold-blooded act happened in Pennsylvania State University. Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State football defense coordinator, was arrested for sexual abuse of young boys for the past 15 years. Although mike McQueary, an assistant coach, testified that he saw Sandusky raping a pre-adolescent boy in a shower room, Sandusky appeared on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams and claimed, “I enjoy young people. I love to be around them, but, no, I’m not sexually attracted to young boys.” Currently, the court let Sandusky go for $100,000 bail. In addition, Penn State fired Sandusky, but there are no legal restrictions on Sandusky’s travel.
Those abused children will forever live in a hell, tainted by the unthinkable crime. However, despicable offenders like Inhwa teachers or Sandusky are not the sole cause of the problem. The world that ignores the powerless is the prime source of the issue. Blinded by the relentless lust for a “better world” in an economic term mostly, we forgot about what it means to be a human being. Martin Buber asserted in his book I And Thou, “The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being. The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.” The moment we objectify others, we replace Thou with It. We are living in a gilded age. We have already experienced how awful a crash of economic bubble can be when the thin layer of gold was removed. What if we remove our thin layers of cultural, political, and social mask?
It is not the stock market or the better president that will bring the change. It is the power inside us. By all means, the people’s compassion for humanity led to reopen the Dogani case. When we look into ourselves and reinstate the “I and Thou” relationship with others, the long-waited change might be more imminent than our expectations.
