Charles on the Itaewon disaster

Charles offers his thoughts on this past weekend's inadvertent carnage.

At one point in his essay, Charles writes about his experience inside a crushing crowd on a subway. I've had similar experiences in the Seoul subway system; one time, nearly thirty years ago, when I was trying to get to work at my hagweon in Gangnam, I was jammed in a subway car with a ton of other people, and there was no way for me to get to the door when my stop came up. Unable to do anything, I had no choice but to stand there, pressed in on all sides by the other commuters. I ended up missing my stop, but when we reached the next stop, where apparently everybody needed to get off, the cramped humanity inside the subway issued forth like an unstoppable lava flow, and I was carried along with everyone else. It was both a frightening and exhilarating feeling, this utter lack of control. I'm a big guy, so it takes a lot to carry the likes of me out of a subway, yet there I was, floating out like a water molecule in a stream. I eventually got on the subway going in the opposite direction; it wasn't anywhere near as crowded, and I made it to work a few minutes late. But, yeah—I know what it's like to be, as Charles puts it, "nothing more than a domino." These days, despite the expense and the potential for traffic jams, I prefer cabs.