By Nam Sang-so
The population in South Korea reached 50 million last month, accounting for 0.71 percent of the total world population of 7.05 billion. These are astronomical figures and for the sake of easier understanding let’s shrink the world population to 100, which reduces the South Korean proportion to 0.71 of a person.
Worldwide, according to gender, there would be roughly 52 women and 48 men. Among them 90 would be heterosexual and 10 gay. Sixty-one are Asians, 13 Africans, 13 from North and South America, 12 Europeans and the remaining one from the South Pacific.
Thirty-three would be Christians, 19 believers in Islam, 13 would be Hindus, six would follow Buddhist teachings, five believe that there are spirits in the trees and rocks, and 24 would believe in other religions or in none. Seventeen percent of 7.05 billion people speak Chinese, 9 percent English, 8 Hindi and Urdu, 6 Spanish, 6 Russian, and 4 would speak Arabic. The rest speak languages including Bengal, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French and Korean.
In such a global village, it is important to learn to understand that people are different from yourself and to accept others as they are. So love the fact that you, and all varied types of others, live in this wonderfully colorful world.
Every society on Earth abides by its own morals and social regimes, all of which were created by humans. When the majority of people accept them they are preserved but they do tend to change.
During the Park Chung-hee era in Korea, young boys started growing their hair long. They thought it was a cool thing to do. The Army general-turned-President detested the boys with long hair and ordered police to grab them in the streets and trim any hair styles that covered the ears. Once an officer grabed a man’s long hair and it was a wig.
Some old-fashioned, ultra conservative fathers also joined the trimming war and clipped their son’s hair if it was thought too long while the son was sleeping, creating a family feud in the morning. Even in Singapore, a dozen pairs of barber’s clippers used to be laid on a table in front of the border control with a sign saying, ``Warning to long-haired men: If you wish to enter our beautiful country, please trim your hair short.” These examples show how daunting it might be to change stereotypes.
Many people first think society is heading in the wrong direction when an old moral is replaced by a new one. The old thinking must be abandoned in order to create a new social norm, which people will eventually accept, for example: the high divorce rate or young girls wearing radically short skirts in non-Islamic countries, or Muslim dress codes in those nations, and we not viewing a man with long hair as unorthodox any more.
We cannot decide whether we are rich or poor by ourselves. It is decided by comparing our wealth with that of our neighbors’ and it’s only a matter of comparison and contrast. If everyone is equally wealthy on this Earth, no one would feel richer than another. On the other hand, if everyone was poor, no one would feel poor, and people wouldn’t complain about it, like most of our brethren in the North.
Yes, we should accept differences but there’s one exception; if our northern daughters start raising their hemlines higher, though not as high as that of the South, and the boys start growing their hair longer and breach some standard, then we the southerners will know the time had come to welcome and accept them as real sisters and brothers.
The writer is a retired architect-specifications writer, who shuttles back and forth between Seoul and New Jersey. Email him at sangsonam@gmail.com.