Demons Next Door
[Native Category’s First Prize-Winning Essay]
Walking down the street, it emerges from the shadows. Long, sharp teeth. Blood-red skin. Horns black as the night and eyes gleaming with malice. A demon. It’s coming your way. “Good evening, Mr. Demon!” you cheerfully call out. Ridiculous. Everyone knows what you do when you see a demon. You fight it. You defeat it. You kill it. On September 10th, a sniper stared through his sights at the stage below. He did not see Charlie Kirk the man. He saw a Republican. A Nazi. An enemy. A demon. What kind of demonization turns a fellow citizen into a monster, and what keeps us all from falling into the same trap? Perhaps it begins when we no longer see the people around us as neighbors.
What is a neighbor? It sounds like a test question from a Grade 1 exam. Well, of course a neighbor is someone who lives in your neighborhood! Who lives near you! Years ago, that might have been true. Citizens who worked together also lived, ate, and laughed together. They had chance meetings and friendly conversations. People knew those around them—both the good and the bad. Can that be said now? To interact with and know our real neighbors requires that we live amongst them. However, as more and more of society moves its interactions into the cloud, real neighborly connection is starting to fade. If local communities were truly being recreated online, then perhaps some of that neighborliness might survive. But online, most interactions are brief and anonymous, and you rarely encounter the same person twice. In such a vast sea, individuals lose the sense of presence they once had with those who lived beside them, and begin to drift into online tribes.
In these online tribes, the small, polite disagreements that once taught neighbors to coexist are gone. Nuanced opinion? Boring! Trying to understand the other’s position? Who cares! Instead, extreme opinions bring the most views. Bridge-building gets overwhelmed by slick smears. Champions emerge on all sides who “destroy” their opponents and “crush” their ideas. In such spaces, the idea of a neighbor doesn’t exist. Instead, the neighbor becomes the enemy. Racist! Fascist! Nazi! Demon. Do you compromise with a demon? You don’t. You shoot it.
When debate dies, violence begins. The idea that passionate advocacy and civil debate have always been the default methods for affecting political change has somehow become a commonly held belief. While it would be great if this were the case, it is simply not true. The somewhat peaceful times we live in are themselves bizarre. An aberration. For almost all of human history, naked violence has been the way problems were solved. In one sense, this recent return to violence can simply be viewed as a regression to the mean. If “the other” is a demon, then violence is not only expected, but rational. Do you try to debate with a demon? No. You shoot it.
This is the core problem. If the demonization of our fellow humans continues, violence will follow. As sure as the sun rises. What is to be done about it? Clearly, people need to find the humanity in their neighbors again. Not through abstract speeches or philosophical texts, but by coming back from the cloud. By finding our neighbors again. By getting to know them. By seeing them. By talking to them. By listening to them. While humanity has a deeply rooted desire to tribalize, it has just as strong a desire to build community with the people next door. It’s easy to demonize others in a land of strangers, but fill it with neighbors and the humanity shines through. A real movement is needed. Not to de-technologize, but to normalize leaving the cloud now and then and rediscover who’s around us. A friendly greeting to that person you always see on the street. Joining in on a conversation in a coffee shop. Complimenting the person next to you on the bus. Knocking on your neighbor’s door to introduce yourself. Every interaction is a tiny push towards the positive. What do you do to a neighbor? Go find out!
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[First Prize Winner’s Remarks]
Looking Past the Past: A Future of Thrilling Boredom!
I’m honored to have been chosen as the winner of this English Essay Contest. Did you like my essay? Ready to charge out and change the world?! Probably not, haha. It’s a difficult subject to discuss without coming across as a crusty old man. But that’s me! I first visited Chonnam National University in 2010. It has been fascinating to see how the neighborhoods surrounding the university have changed. Many of the streets that used to be jampacked now seem like ghost towns to me. But it’s not all doom and gloom. As one district fades, another blooms, and the cycle repeats. I’m excited to see how the next generation will face and overcome the problems of today and tomorrow.
Gwangju strikes me as being a city brimming with potential, just waiting for a spark that will ignite something big! When people focus their efforts and collaborate, who knows what they’ll make? But the desire to embark upon grand-scale plans does not come easy. Consider music. It’s one thing to gather some friends and create a band. But to grind away, hours upon hours, perfecting each song, mastering each instrument, throwing away hundreds of songs before finding that one that just… works.
The will to see through a project like that, I believe, has another, more fundamental prerequisite: boredom. In an era of near infinite entertainment, how often are any of us truly bored? I think my essay topic and this idea are linked. Regardless, whatever the future holds, I’m grateful to the contest organizers for giving me a platform to share these observations, and to all of you for reading them. Here’s to the next spark, the next song, and the next generation of Gwangju dreamers who’ll turn boredom into brilliance. Thank you!
By Naven Patrick Terrance, Master’s Student, Dept. of English Education, Graduate School