By By Miles Bett, Staff Writer
Operating under the assumption that you have indeed come into contact with some form of global news in the past few weeks, I am sure you have noted the increased tensions on the Korean Peninsula. To say they have risen would be to indulge in a grotesque understatement, but the general truth is the same. The two halves of that wildly bifurcated bit of land haven’t been so close to war in half a century.
Being a group of learned and intensely mature people, my friends and I have all had discussion on the topic ranging from facts to wild conjecture. After such talks I have come to form an idea about why exactly the North tends to lob bombs at the South and act in a manner wholly unwarranted. Stay with me through this, but their actions remind me of my grandmother’s street in England.
She has a dog, and every day I would take him for a walk in the park. To get there, we would pass this house that had a high fence around it, but one you could still see through. We knew nothing of the people who lived in that house besides what we could tell from the garden, which was well kept. But here is the meat of the analogy.
They had a small, perennially yippy dog that would all but hurl itself at the fence in an attempt to reach you. It would squeak and squawk and make all kinds of noise. This wasn’t their only dog, they had some big labrador stashed away in their garden, but it was this little ball of irritation that always made itself known.
That is how the North tends to act. They make just enough noise that you will never really forget that they are there. Whenever you step even an inch too close to their side of the fence they will hurl themselves at you, yipping and snarling and making far too much noise for their small size.
The conundrum that such a tiny dog presents is that you want, after weeks and weeks of being barked at, to poke it with a stick. Just to give it a little jab to make it shut up. Don’t get me wrong, I deplore animal cruelty and detest anyone who indulges in such a heinous act, but this dog all but begs to be poked. But you can’t and moreover won’t do so.
To poke it would require you going into that yard and confronting him without a fence, and though he may be small he still has very sharp teeth and a nasty bite. So you don’t go into that yard; you don’t want to deal with the pain of that bite. You walk towards the park, ignoring the yipping and snarling.
Therein lies the problem with the North, at least in my eyes and that of some of my peers. Yes, we would love to do something to rid ourselves of the worry and nuisance that is the secretive country, but they do have a bite and I am sure if you ask most people they would rather listen to those barks than deal with the alternative.