Some dark thoughts on a train ride from Seoul to Busan

This is a transcript of a voice recording I made on November 28, 2011 at 11:12am.

I have been thinking about Korea a lot, obviously because I’m in this country, I’ve been here for almost six months, and I think I have really adjusted to living here. I think I have adjusted to the culture and a lot of those types of things. Of course, I’m not Korean, and even if I stay here for twenty years, I never will be Korean.

One of the things I am just blown away with is, “How did this happen? How did Korea go from, sixty years ago, being one of the poorest countries in the world, to now being one of the wealthiest countries in the world?” It’s an incredible accomplishment. I spent some time in Europe last year, I have spent time in a lot of the biggest cities in the U.S., a lot of the wealthiest cities in the U.S., and none of them quite compare to this place.

I feel like if you had gone back in time to 1955 or something and just said, “Using the U.S. as your model, how would you try to build a modern country more or less from scratch?” That’s almost exactly what Korea looks like today. I think about things like the fact that I can ride this train that goes almost 200 miles an hour from the biggest city in Korea to the second biggest city in Korea in less than two hours and it costs me $45 one way, cheaper than a plane ticket.

This morning I woke up and I was in a neighborhood (Hongdae) in Seoul. So I walked for five minutes and then I got on a train, rode the train for twenty minutes to Seoul Station, the central station, and then came up from that train, got in line, got a train ticket, got some McDonald’s breakfast, and then got on the next train bound for Busan. When I get to Busan, I will walk outside the train station, and I am going walk right outside, walk to this bus stop, get on the bus, be on the bus for less than half an hour, and then get off the bus at the stop right in front of my school.

Imagine if that was possible in the U.S. What if you could do that in Houston? What if I could stay with my friends Summer and Matt in Houston, and there was a subway station a few blocks away from their home, and I could take that subway station to downtown Houston, to a place we can call “Houston Station”, and there was this huge central train station in Houston. There were trains that go to the airports, there were trains that go to all the different suburbs, subways that go to the different areas of the city, and then there was a bullet train that went to Dallas and Fort Worth and another one that went to San Antonio and Austin.

I think it would be remarkable. I would be...it’s almost silly to speculate on that, because what we have is so far from that. But why is it silly to speculate on that? Why is it impossible? It’s impossible because we made all these decisions over the last 50 years, and the more I look at them the more it looks like we just made the most irresponsible choices that we could have made.

Instead of investing in our infrastructure of our cities, we built rings of suburbs around them and then let the cities deteriorate. Instead of following up the successes of the civil rights movement with some effort to actually bring Blacks and other minorities up to a level with Whites, we followed the Civil Rights movement with the War on Drugs and Vietnam and all these things that just absolutely brutalized the Black community and set them back...

So here we are, forty years later, and there are neighborhoods in the inner cities of Dallas and Houston, and every other major city that White people just won’t go to, because they are these crime-ridden environments that are just really dangerous and destructive, devastating to people’s lives.

How did we (the U.S.) get from there to here? It seems like such a high level of hubris on our part, to just assume that the world is going to continue down this track where we can continue to be the most successful country in the world. I was thinking abut the history of it, we talk about East meets West, these two cultures that developed more or less separately from each other coming together for the first time and how the West had all these natural advantages over the East, and the East was very slow to adapt to that.

The biggest country in the East, China, waited until the last thirty years to try to adapt. But now it seems like places like that are making all these bold moves. China is building this nationwide high speed rail network from scratch and trying to do it in ten years, at the same time that America’s infrastructure is deteriorating.