hankyoreh

Apr. 22 marked one week since the Sewol ferry capsized. It has been an excruciating past few days, but the number of rescued passengers printed on the front pages of South Korea’s newspapers has refused to budge from its total of 174. Each new discovery simply moves numbers from the “missing” column to the death toll. That toll officially entered three digits on Tuesday morning with the recovery of another five bodies of Danwon High School students, all girls. Underneath the beautiful spring skies, we are seeing these young flowers cast before us, brutally cut down before they ever had the chance to blossom.

In Jindo, Paengmok Port is a sea of sorrow. It is evident in the nervous look that comes over the parents every time another unidentified victim is recovered. The bodies are shrouded in white sheets, concealing them from view, but the chemical smell of anti-decomposition agents triggers an instinctive understanding that children have died. The waters off Jindo echo with the strangled cries, the uncontrollable sobbing, as one parent after another confirms the face of their child, now forever cold. One particularly troubling report is that many of the children found in the cabins of the Sewol had broken fingers and bruised palms. It is chilling to imagine how they must have scratched and pounded on the walls to escape the sinking boat they were trapped on.

The sense of shame and horror at our failure to save these lives is overwhelming. What sent these children to their fate in the cold waters of the sea was the avarice and cowardice of their elders. The list of errors by the “grown-ups” is more than 100 items long: importing a used boat, making inadvisable expansions, loading too much freight, leaving inexperienced people at the helm, a captain behaving irresponsibly and a government responding incompetently. If any one of these things had been done right, then perhaps the fate of those children might have been different.

It is time for us to make a solemn vow as adults. That we will stop living this way. That we will mend our ways and stop laughing at the rules and taking the “rough-and-ready” approach to anything that comes our way as long as there’s money in it. Maybe then, by some miracle, those children might come back alive from the cold and dark place they were sent to.

April 22 was supposed to be the start of a four-day neap tide that will drastically reduce currents in the Jindo area. There will be a visible drop in the difference between high and low tides, and water speeds will fall by about half. The waters may still be heartless and unyielding as they calm to their quietest levels in the past week, but at least the search for the missing can gather a bit more momentum, which offers a slim ray of hope. Miracles have happened before, and they can happen again. Why not now? Here’s hoping that the military and police give their all to the rescue effort that is under way now.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]