There’s a video making the rounds on YouTube featuring a supposedly Korean youngster making rather vile comments about his happiness in hearing about the disaster in Japan. I’ll not link to it as I don’t want to offer any support, implicit or otherwise, but you can find it easily enough if you’re of a mind to do so. In any case, he says some hate filled things such as “So you guys are already contaminated with the radiation?” and “I’m always thinking about Japanese people dying but I can’t kill them directly”.
What really struck me is how young this person is. Whenever I see a kid engaged in such hate mongering, the first thought that comes to mind is “okay, who taught this kid to think this way?”, because it’s obvious in this case as in so many others that the kid isn’t speaking of any personal life experience he himself went through, rather he was clearly trained by his elders.
And that’s sad. It’s sad because the sort of people who would seek to warp young peoples’ minds aren’t just satisfied with their own hatred, they want to pass it along and ensure it’s generational survival. And that provides a horrendous disservice to the kids themselves, along with their whole generation, as it’s impossible to even attempt a clean slate or even begin to find a way forward under these conditions.
The saddest thing of all is that the trainers have been hurt or injured in some way and want revenge. This is understandable if not acceptable in modern society. But what they are really doing is making sure that their own kids and grandkids suffer just as much as they did, albeit vicariously in most cases, so in attempting to carry their anger and hatred forward in order to harm their enemies they are instead poisoning the minds of their own people and ensuring that cycle of hatred and suffering will continue.
I wonder if they ever thought about it that way.
