Lindy, it's important not to think of elephants as elephants. They are individual mammals, just like the rest of us. Presuming that they think and behave, or even look a certain way, is racist and bigoted, prejudiced and unfair.
You could put an elephant and a lion together and not be able to tell the difference. Sometimes elephants have long noses and sometimes short. Some lions have big ears and some have small. Some elephants eat buffalo and some lions eat grass.
It's hilarious that they want to treat an elephant as though he's just another student wanting to study engineering or something.
The fact that he's Korean, not long in the USA, tells something about him. So will lots of other facts. Why was it even mentioned that he's male? That leads people to be prejudicial and racial about male elephants. Women can be violent and shoot guns too. And why use age as a descriptor? That's agist. Even young people and old people have shot people.
I know a few Koreans from our local golf club. Generally, one can tell they are Koreans. They are quite intense, quite wound up even, with very challenging natures. They are also very friendly, when everything is hunky dory. But they play really slowly and don't repair their divots and pitch marks [not as a rule, but all too often].
One young Korean guy [there were lots on golf training scholarships] was playing with my friend and I [a nice young guy] and we wanted to play through a group of three or 4 older Korean guys. They were quite surly and the young guy didn't know what to do. He was bowing flat out to them as we went by. He commented "I don't want to die" in regard to the objection they might have. He wasn't totally joking. Many a truth spoken in jest. He was Christian. Nice young man.
Our son knows a young woman from their time in Japan in the early 1990s. She is from Canada. When back in Canada she met a young Korean guy who turned out to be not the most benign person. He ended up in prison. He and somebody had robbed somebody and in making their getaway, he had advised his buddy "shoot him in the legs - we don't want a murder charge". So they did. The young woman and he had a son, who she named after our son [who was a good friend while at high school in Japan]. Eventually, I forget how now, the young Korean guy was killed in some misadventure [out of prison I believe].
I thought of him when reading about the elephant in Virginia. Americans behave like Americans, Koreans like Koreans, elephants like elephants, and NZers like NZers. By and large. More or less. With plenty of exceptions notwithstanding.
Thank goodness guns don't kill people. Imagine how many would die if guns got in on the act too.
How about making it compulsory for everyone except convicted felons to carry a couple of guns? Say a pistol and a sawn off shotgun. Maybe a hand grenade too for hardened attackers. That should make life at school more pleasant.
Kim in North Korea is Korean. I am not convinced that him being nucular armed would be an excellent idea, though I hasten to add that nukes don't kill people any more than guns do.
Mqurice |
