Across Hannam-daero

On crisis fatigue and political lethargy in South Korea and at Columbia.

By Marvin Cho

Illustration by Isabelle Oh

Disgruntled from interrupted sleep, I threw open my bedroom window. Sure enough, they were at it again. An indistinguishable call-and-response of words—now from a blaring megaphone, now from a roaring crowd—cut through the frigid December air in Hannam-dong, South Korea. It was safe to say that a few more hours of Sunday morning rest were out of the picture. 

It had been almost a month since the now-impeached President Yoon Seok-yeol shocked South Korea and the world by declaring martial law. The country was ablaze: Anti-Yoon protesters demanded that he be arrested and prosecuted for the instigation of rebellion, while Yoon’s supporters vehemently defended him and demanded instead for the immediate incarceration of the opposing Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-Myung, sentenced in November to a suspended jail term for violating election law. The central battleground for these warring protests was Hannam-daero, the boulevard in front of the presidential residence. It just so happened that there, on the other side of Hannam-daero, was my bedroom. 

Over winter break, I made a habit of spending my mornings in a faraway library in order to escape the turmoil. This morning was no different. As I waited, semiconscious, for the bus to Namsan Public Library (which, because the protests had swallowed Hannam-dong whole, was scheduled to take a 30-minute detour), I stared at the sea of protestors just across the street. I saw faces, noticed signs, heard voices; but the protesters’ distraught expressions and words, soaked in existential dread about the future of our country’s democracy, failed to make any impression on me. All I felt was a dull impatience for the bus’ arrival.

In retrospect, I am struck by how quickly I grew numb to the political crisis that was unfolding just outside my window. Since when were the blare of the megaphone and roar of the crowd inaudible to my ears? When had the chants and signs turned to gibberish? When I first learned of Yoon’s martial law declaration from New York, it became my principal concern for days. Neither homework nor class could stop me from scouring the internet, seeking answers for my many concerns and curiosities. And when, days later, I was in the backseat of a car headed back to my home from the airport, I kept my gaze fixed outside the window. One of the most critical conversations in my nation’s history was unfolding before me: I wasn’t going to miss any of it. 

Underlying all this anxiety was a genuine belief that Yoon’s martial law declaration was an act of rebellion against the South Korean democratic process. Last April, the Democratic Party of Korea had won a near 60 percent majority over the National Assembly in a general election that saw the highest turnout in 32 years, considered to be a strong vote of no confidence in Yoon. Ever since then, the Yoon administration and the Assembly have been locked in an insoluble impasse, with Yoon constantly vetoing Assembly bills at record frequency. More recently, the Democrat-held Assembly began to ramp up the pressure on Yoon himself. They voted to appoint a special prosecutor to formally investigate First Lady Kim Keon-Hee’s alleged corruption and political interference—a national controversy which had significantly withered public approval of Yoon—and to impeach members of the Yoon cabinet for refusing to investigate her beforehand. So, when Yoon claimed baselessly that the declaration was motivated by “anti-state activities” and declared fantastically that the Democratic Party was “a monster,” I could not help but hear a tinge of personal resentment toward the hostile National Assembly, whose actions, just or not, were determined by due democratic process. It did not help that, shortly after his declaration, Yoon ordered a blockade of armed forces and police buses to surround the Assembly building, trying to block their constitutional power to end martial law. Combined with the fact that the most recent martial law declaration in South Korea was the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, in which 600 to 2,300 students were killed for protesting against military dictatorship, the ordeal took on a disturbingly antidemocratic feel.

Yet, only a few weeks later, I was more preoccupied with the late arrival of my bus than the impassioned clash of protests about democracy. I am embarrassed to admit this, yet I was probably not alone in this experience. In only three weeks of winter break, I observed the conversations among friends and family slowly shift from debates about the martial law declaration itself to resentment against protesters and the disturbance caused to daily business. This shift can be observed even on a national level: In the three months after his declaration of martial law, Yoon’s approval rate has ballooned from a historically low 11 percent to a strikingly high 46.6 percent. Analysts for The Korea Times attribute this rise to “a shared mistrust in the Democratic Party of Korea and antipathy towards its leader, Representative Lee Jae-Myung, who is seen as a favorite to win the next presidential election[.]” But this renewed willingness to stand behind Yoon as the figurehead for Korean conservatism necessitates a collective forgetfulness about the universal outrage and large-scale unrest felt across the nation last December. 

Crisis fatigue is dangerous precisely because of its ability to tear people away from their moral compasses, as in my own case and that of  the South Korean public. And, as with all dangerous things, those who think themselves to be invulnerable are the most vulnerable of all. 

For a place that has so recently garnered national attention for its political activism, the majority of Columbia’s community now seems to have been sucked dry of its political vitality. A stifling silence has replaced the passionate discussions that once filled the campus, and the occasional flares of activism are met with fatigued sighs rather than genuine support or opposition. The lull of discourse on campus certainly has much to do with the University’s draconian surveillance policies, which suffocate the community and manufacture a collective resentment against the voices that they are designed to root out. In such an exclusive institutional bubble in which even those included are worn down by the ever-present glare of University-employed security, it is no wonder that political discourse on campus has been so significantly dampened. 

However, we would be lying to ourselves if we did not accept that some of the political lethargy in our community comes from within. It is easier—and far more comfortable—to sleep through the noise. As I observe my community this semester, I am often reminded of myself back in Korea, sitting absentmindedly at the Hannam-dong bus station. I see myself in my Lit Hum class when we collectively ignored a Columbia University Apartheid Divest protest just outside the window; I see myself equally in the countless students on College Walk who scurry disinterestedly past a stand with harrowing pictures of Israeli civilians killed or held hostage by Hamas. I relate, too, to the fact that the outcry of Columbians lamenting Trump’s election day victory has dwindled significantly as Trump actually works to make true on his campaign promises.

The Columbia community that I observed when I was accepted last spring spoke with an urgency that met the historical moment we were living in. And while we experience the ebb and flow of fatigue and ardor, that historical moment remains no less critical than it did last spring. As of the writing of this article, the fate of Palestinians and Israeli hostages in Gaza hangs in the balance of a tenuous and uncertain ceasefire agreement, the United States’ conciliatory treatment of Russia in Russo-Ukrainian peace negotiations threaten international alliances both in Europe and East Asia, and President Trump’s accumulating executive orders call America’s status as a bastion of fair governance and individual rights into question. Clearly, history will not wait for us to catch our breath. Now is not the time to shut ourselves off, tired though we may be, from the noise desperately coming from the window.

For me to claim that all Columbians should always be as vocal as possible in political discourse would be both counterproductive and hypocritical; as a Classics lover who spends most of my intellectual energy thinking about ancient debates and philosophies, contemporary politics is not necessarily always on my mind. Yet there is an increasing need for people like myself to recognize the voice of crisis fatigue in those fleeting moments where we read about, hear, or witness political activity, and wish in our innermost thoughts for the bus to come a couple minutes sooner.

Aristotle argues in Politics that the defining nature of human beings is life in political community—a community defined by the use of speech to ponder the just versus the unjust. Any political speech—a light-hearted debate among friends or large-scale clash of ideologies—is thus not only in our nature, but is our nature. The protests at Hannam-daero, however much they disturbed the daily activity of residents like me, can never be a disruption to any status quo that is worth preserving, because it itself is the status quo that ought to be—the status quo worth defending. To resent political speech, as I did as I was forced awake across the street, is to resent ourselves.