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Insecure feeling
Dear Annie: I feel a little crazy writing to you. I always like to figure my problems out myself, but this time, I'd like another person's point of view.
I married my high school sweetheart, and we have been together more than 15 years. "Steve" has a high-profile job where many women throw themselves at him. To my knowledge, he always has been faithful to me.
Recently, I've had an insecure feeling, and I don't know why. Steve is an excellent father and a very good husband, and from what his friends say, he speaks highly of our marriage and of me when I'm not around. He is home any time he is not working.
The trouble is that I know some of the men he works with are unfaithful, and their wives are oblivious. So while I had no real reason to suspect him, I looked through Steve's cell phone and found that he called a female during his work shift. I have seen her name on his list of missed calls more than once. I believe she is a co-worker on the same shift, but what if she's not?
Steve never hides his cell phone, wallet or anything else from me. I know he wouldn't appreciate my prying, because he's done nothing to warrant it. I can't ask him about the cell phone or he'll know I snooped, but I don't want to miss "the signs" and be taken for a fool. It would crush me if people were talking about me like they do some of the other wives. --?Insecurity Is Such a Lonely Word in Albany, N.Y.
Dear Albany: We would never discount your intuition, but your anxieties can be fueled when you are surrounded by tales of cheating husbands. You need to talk to Steve. Explain to him that you've been feeling a little insecure and you'd appreciate some reassurance. Ask him point-blank about the women he works with, and if Ms. Cell Phone's name doesn't pop up, it's time to 'fess up and discuss it.
Dear Annie: My husband and I have been married for one year. He has a daughter, 8, and a son, 10, and they share a bedroom. The kids each have a bed to themselves, but they see each other shower and change clothes.
I told my husband that this is not proper, that the children are too old for this behavior. I also said that in California they have a law about different-sex siblings sharing a room after a certain age. Am I wrong or is this all OK? -- Confused in L.A.
Dear Confused: If someone reported abuse between the children, the law would step in, but otherwise, nothing illegal is going on here. However, it certainly is not in the best interests of these children to have them share a bedroom. Both siblings deserve some privacy and should not be undressing in front of each other. Tell your husband it's time they had separate space, even if that means rigging a sheet down the middle of the room.
2005.06.06
South Korea, a country possessed by past
The Straits Times / Asia News Network
Political language can be arbitrary. The terms left- and right-wing originate from nothing more profound than who sat where in France's National Assembly - before the revolution. But "progressive" has a more definite meaning. From the Latin, it means going forward; whereas "conservatives" wish to conserve, to keep things the way they are.
Ironically, in today's world, it is capitalism that is revolutionary while the Left's resistance to globalization looks conservative. Although universal themes, they look different depending on where you are. South Korea is especially distinctive. There, a progressivism brutally suppressed by decades of military rule has emerged triumphant. But whether it is doing the right thing is another matter.
In the 2002 presidential election, South Koreans rejected the favorite candidate, a patrician judge from the old elite, and chose Roh Moo-hyun, a labor lawyer from a poor farm. Last year, in a backlash against an attempt to impeach Roh, they also handed his Uri Party the parliamentary majority it had hitherto lacked.
Thus today, self-styled progressives wield power for the first time. Yet this is a peculiar progressivism, more obsessed with past wrongs than building the future.
Like China, South Korea is furious with Japan over its revised textbooks that erase its World War II atrocities. Yet Seoul is also angry with Beijing for claiming Goguryeo, an ancient state encompassing today's North Korea and part of Manchuria. Goguryeo ended in A.D. 668, so this seems an eccentric cause for progressives to be espousing.
Roh and the Uri Party have also set up official probes into the eras of Japanese colonialism (1910-1945) and military rule (1961-1987). While both indeed saw crimes that remain occluded, the aim here is less South African-style reconciliation than partisan advantage. Many say its apparent target is Park Geun-hye, who leads the conservative opposition Grand National Party and is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, an authoritarian president from 1961 to 1979, and a Japanese officer in his youth.
With challenges ranging from a slowing economy to a possibly nuclear-armed North Korea, is it rational to sow discord by reopening old wounds? But reason counts for little against a gut feeling of ancient resentment. Ritualized emotion has priority; hurts are nursed, not healed.
For an economy (the world's 10th largest) that grew rich selling to others, politically South Korea is remarkably introverted. A country never short of nationalist attitude believes it is not yet assertive enough. Roh also preaches an "independent" foreign and defense policy - which sounds oddly neutralist for a U.S. ally.
Posturing leads to bad policy. At home, an obsession with inequality - in one of the world's least unequal societies - drove a silly and costly plan to shift the capital south, now watered down as a new administrative city.
Prioritizing distribution over growth has distracted from the real task: how to stay economically competitive against the Chinese challenge. One answer is more flexible labor; yet that is apparently not happening. As for business, while chaebol reform still has a way to go, Roh's mixed signals and anti-capitalist image deter companies from investing enough to revive growth and stay ahead internationally.
But it is in foreign policy where perverse progressivism poses the greatest peril. Bizarrely, an opinion poll last year cited the United States as the biggest threat to South Korea. More recently, Japan topped the list. Whatever one's view of U.S. President George W. Bush, to anyone thinking straight, a nuclear-equipped and bankrupt North Korea just 50 kilometers from Seoul - with artillery shells trained on it - must be the real worry. Also, few others in the region are so unfazed either by China's rising military clout or fear that its social tensions might explode. Yet the new Seoul smiles at Beijing and Pyongyang, while scowling at Tokyo and Washington.
Where does this outlook come from? From the "386 generation" - people in their 30s who went to college in the 1980s - now run the country. Rejecting the liberalism of earlier student protesters, many had embraced Marxism.
In power, older but little wiser, they have retained attitudes forged while fighting the U.S.-backed Chun Doo-hwan regime (1980-1988). Now it is payback time.
Yet if these intelligent and highly educated people recall Marx, they would see that they are stuck in the antithesis stage of the dialectic - a mirror image of all they fought against. In being dead against everything the old regime stood for, they remain - ironically - in thrall to it.
What South Korea needs, urgently, is to move on to the synthesis stage and achieve closure. In today's Seoul, a truly progressive outlook would forget the past, look outward and use cold reason to focus firmly and pragmatically on a difficult present and an ominous future.
At home, that entails a shift in the economy to services, while opening these to foreigners to achieve world-class quality. Abroad, it means thinking hard about where the national interest truly points.
Head, if not heart, should prescribe continued ties to the U.S. and Japan, caution towards China, and being ready for anything with North Korea. As Germany has shown, unification, if it comes to the two Koreas, will be a vast burden for decades. Real progressives would prepare for this, not court a tyrant who mocks their goodwill. If appeasing Dear Leader Kim Jong-il fails, what is Seoul's plan B?
Aidan Foster-carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University in the United Kingdom. He is also a freelance consultant on Korea, and has followed Korean affairs for more than 35 years. - Ed.
By Aidan Foster-carter
2005.06.08