The hottest trend in South Korea right now is the binding of yellow ribbons and/or posting a picture of it on social media, whether as a post or as your profile picture. You can read more about the Yellow Ribbon Campaign here.
This tragic accident had made me feel and think a lot of things. One of the things I realized is how small of a country Korea is. I mean that they're physically small, but the hearts of these people are not. One thing that struck me as a reminder of how physically small the country is was when I got on the Korean portal site, Naver. Right underneath the search bar are your popular search items, what's trending. Three of these are shown at a time and you can scroll through them and there's about 3 or 4 scrolls. However ever since the Sewol ferry accident, all that's been trending were "The Rescue Situation for Sewol" "Live Updates" and now with the Yellow Ribbon Campaign underway, "Yellow Ribbon Campaign". Those are the only three items that are offered underneath the Naver search bar and you couldn't even click the next line of trends. The entire country was on their phones and computers about this, and reasonably so. Not only that, the variety programs that are widely viewed in South Korea have all been cancelled for last weekend. All that's been on television is the news. On top of that, much of artists' concerts have been cancelled.
In comparison to a much bigger country in its physically size, the United States, does not all collectively react like this. Sure, in the instance of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting accident, the whole nation was mourning, there's no doubt about that. But paying condolences was limited to the Newtown community, not necessarily other cities in other states. Does that make sense? Sure all the Americans were bashing the shooter, they were mourning with the families affected, but that was it, not to degrade that or anything, but that simply was all. As for South Korea, it's about a third of the state of Texas, so it's a much smaller country compared to the United States, so it's much easier for all parts of the country to actively do something about it. Not that America's vast size would have prevented the people from doing such a campaign as the Yellow Ribbon Campaign.
I've already mentioned this before, but in South Korea, such high tragedies do not happen much. America is a much bigger country, like I said already, and so there's more this sense of each state doing its own thing, everyone plays separately. But as South Korea is already a small country in itself and tragedies like the Sewol incident does that happen anywhere in Korea, it's just a huge shock and trauma for all Koreans, regardless of which region they live in.
The Yellow Ribbon Campaign is beautiful. To see pictures of Koreans binding their yellow ribbons or change their profile pictures to like that of the one above, shows a great sense of unity. Despite all the accusations to each other, we Koreans are all in this together. In one other article I read about this campaign, there was a rather rude comment posted about how a bunch of yellow ribbons do not really create a sense of hope. What a thoughtless thing to say. And a very narrow-minded comment, too. This hope we're talking of here goes beyond hoping for survivors, it's the hope that in the midst of the chaos, even if we're still looked down on as a small country, as long as there's unity, there is hope.
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