Never has the Korean Peninsula been more at risk throughout Korean history. The North pours ceaseless efforts into reinforcing its nuclear weaponry. The U.S. refuses to resort to the usual peace talks to safeguard world security. Instead, Washington steers toward counterattacking the military threats from Pyongyang with equivalent action. The roles have been reversed. As the face of the former peacekeeper has turned aggressive, the communist regime should seek negotiation, or push ahead with its plan. Nations on the sidelines sit on the edges of their seats in fear. The word ‘peace’ seems to have been phased out of the world’s vocabulary.

Under political and social unrest, people under duress attempt to pinpoint the thematic roles in the unscripted narrative, mainly the agent and the patient. Their attention centers on pinning down who performs the action and who suffers the subsequent damage. Such identification paves way to a misleading problem-solving mechanism by placing full-scale blame on the agent. However, the world we live in cannot be defined with clarity as in language. In reality, consequences of an action do not arise from one single cause, but from multiple causes intertwined with one another.

A recent example proves the limitation of language to accurately translate the world into words and sentences. In August, around 100 days before the recruitment in November, the Korean government revealed its plan to hire a significantly smaller number of elementary school teachers. As a result, university students studying elementary education voiced their outrage for the loss of job security. Here, neither the administration nor the students are at fault. The last-minute decision is derived from the long-standing social problem in the nation: low birthrate. The inflexible system of teacher’s colleges that admitted prospective teachers to provide relevant education wreaked havoc by leaving the fledglings on their own to suddenly find alternative career paths.

This problem-stricken world requires our utmost attention than any time in modern history. Inside the inter-workings of the problems at hand, a multitude of players are at play. Therefore, all players should shoulder the responsibility and together they hold the key to upholding peace entitled to all entities in the world.

Lee Sei-yon
Editor-in-Chief