Back to Black
Joanne Black
The older I become, the more I pay attention to events that have lasted longer than I have. The reign of Queen Elizabeth II is one, and the Korean War is another. I hadn’t realised the two countries on the Korean Peninsula were technically still at war until I was once asked the question during a game of Trivial Pursuit. Thus the great episodes of modern history are rendered to questions in a board game.
It seems hard to believe that only last year, I was reassuring my anxious daughter that North Korea did not have a hope of landing missiles on US soil; now people are arguing over who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Korean War. That debate seems a little like a girl on her first date planning her wedding dress. Not so fast, methinks.
Nevertheless, the rapprochement between the leaders of North and South Korea is a step to celebrate. Talking is always better than not talking, except to teenagers: you might as well save your breath until they are older.
It will be important that US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, are allowed to dismount from their high horses with dignity. A great deal could still go wrong but it is exciting to think that people, especially Koreans, who were born before this conflict started may live long enough to see the end of it.
The New York Times, to which I subscribe, runs a section called, “The Week in Good News”. The problem with this, it seems to me, is that it implies that everything else in the Times is bad news. Pointing out that there were seven stories each week that counted as uplifting merely serves to illustrate that things are as bad as we all think. Further, some weeks the editors of the good-news section appear to struggle to fill their quota. One recent week, a featured story said it had snowed in Rome, so people had the day off. Now I am as keen as the next person for an unexpected day off but as with “where to see spring flowers in New York” and news that a bichon frise called Flynn had won the Westminster Dog Show, readers could be forgiven for thinking, “Is that it?” Further, good news for
Flynn was not such good news for Slick the border collie, Lucy the borzoi and Winston the norfolk terrier who were Nearly But Not
Quite Best In Show at Westminster.
There are certainly more serious stories that make The Week in
Good News, such as the creation of Yaguas National Park in Peru. Described as “one of the last great intact forests on the globe”, it really is news worth celebrating, though there are doubtless more than a few Peruvian locals for whom it is not.
The Times’s dilemma is neither new nor restricted to that newspaper. We all tend to remember only the shocking, worrying or downright sickening news we see or read each day. Presumably it is some kind of survival instinct. Those who read the stories that possums are carrying a virus that might make you lose a limb are forewarned and survive, whereas those who remember only where to look for spring flowers in New York are, what? More likely to lose a limb? Unlikely. Better adapted to life in the
21st century, which has never been safer? Possibly. Maybe the happiest people are so busy looking for beauty that they never read the news at all.
People are arguing over who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Korean War.