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Re: Where is Our Social Conscience?
by Schizo on Jan 02, 2003 - 06:19 AM
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OK. Saying "I'm sorry for your loss" is not an apology to me, it's expressing sympathy. It's the sort of thing I might say to Bettie when her rats died.
How could the President ensure it never happened again if it were the fault of the girls? Magically increase the intelligence and common-sense level of all teenagers in South Korea? Put windshields in tanks so drivers can get killed when under fire?
Yeah, ideally, the President might have expressed sympathy earlier, but the President is a very VERY busy man, busier than we realize, I think. Maybe the incedent came at a very busy time, when he literally did not have those few extra minutes. Maybe his advisors didn't tell him much about how pissed the South Koreans were, so he didn't realize that much grovelling was needed.
When foreigners have accidents and kill Americans here, do their leaders even as much as express sympathy to us? It takes a tragedy on the scale of 9-11 for foreign leaders to give a damn about the death of Americans. And that wasn't even an accident.
So it's not just America that is so rude. If it was truly rudeness. It's an unendearing trait that's common to the entire globe.
I wouldn't be making a big deal of this, except you seemed to be assuming, along with the South Koreans, that these soldiers were a couple of buffoons goofing off with no respect for human life. Perhaps an easy thing to think, when you don't realize the difficulties of driving a tank. Maybe most Koreans picture it with the vision range of a car with its big windshield and side windows. But I keep picturing my cousin in the same situation. And it just makes me mad to see how people jumped to conclusions and assumed these men were guilty of negligence.
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