Gwangju brings out the children for its candlelight rally.

In relation to my last post, I found myself in downtown Gwangju on Saturday night and found a little candlelight rally against American beef. The Korea Times told us that about 60% of people at the rallies in Seoul were students, and that number was about the same in Gwangju, if not higher. It was held on Chungjangno, a street that has some type of festival or event every weekend, and a street that is bordered on one side by "hagwon street" and on another side by the huge pedestrian shopping/drinking area, so it's no surprise that the rally attracted the demographics it did. It was also a family affair, with lots of parents with their small children. One newspaper article said about 8,000 people were there. Most of my photos from last night sucked, but compared to the ones out there on Naver (here and here and here, for example), they don't look so bad anymore. Here's a few of mine:









I also grabbed a few videos which might be of interest to those who understand Korean. I don't, but in some ways it doesn't really matter as the visuals are enough. The first one is of a rap group whose song's refrain goes "All my ladies, if you want it just shake that ass."



I'm not going to embed these next two, but they're of high school students who got up on stage to testify. You can find them here and here. Again, I don't understand much of what they're saying, but I do know the issue of beef in schools is big among my students, many of whom feel they'll be forced to eat American beef if it floods the market. That, in my opinion, is something worth protesting, though students and teachers ought to consider that Korean and Australian beef will still exist, and will be available for schools to purchase if they choose. As you can imagine I am not happy with people attributing incorrect dangers to American beef, and as I see it that hysteria has thus far trumped any economic concerns or protests. After all the signs say "I want to live!" not "I want the members of my community to earn a fair price for their cattle in this newly competitive market!" I think I'm going to use "살고 싶다!" ironically from here on out, sort of like how others use "Korea, Sparkling!" whenever something decidedly unsparkling happens.

And finally, here's one of a little kid being fed lines. The beginning is cut off a little, sorry:



As a foreigner in Korea, my opinions are pretty much worthless in the grand scheme of things. My opinions are generally dismissed by Koreans and Korean-Americans anyway, and that's not even when I take a grossly unpopular position. I brought up the issue of these protests at my last teachers' workshop. Among the highlights was when I brought up the thing about

94 percent of Koreans have genes that make them more susceptible than Americans or Britons to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), which is the human variant of mad cow disease, and this physical trait makes Koreans two to three times more likely than Americans or Britons to contract the disease

my colleagues believed it because a scientist said it. I always come heavy whenever I know we'll be talking about contentious issues, so I showed them the Korean-language Joongang-Ilbo article on the scientist who was pissed that the Mad Cow Disease nonsense was being exaggerated and that his ideas were being used for political ends. The teachers immediately dismissed the article because it was from the Joongang Ilbo, "the government's newspaper."

Anyway, they're having another couple rallies next weekend, too, if anybody's interested in going and taking pictures that don't completely suck. I'm sure the kids will be out in force again, and while that's not an exclusively Korean practice, it's a common and annoying one nonetheless. And again, my point remains that if you're a student who's going to invoke "살고 싶다!" it'd be more practical and more urgent to shout that at your bus drivers and all those who share your roads.