No Balls and No Strikes

     What do you do when a neighboring country announces that it is in "a state of war" with the country you live in? Why, you get the baseball season underway, of course.
     I don't know what North Korea has been thinking the last couple weeks, but it seems that they've made a number of people nervous. Some members of the government, a handful of journalists, and one or two security "experts", all seem to be on pins and needles, in addition to a couple of my friends on Facebook, and my mother--though my mother seems to have made nervousness a perpetual state of her existence (probably a prerequisite for motherhood). Personally, I don't think Kim Jong Un has the balls to strike South Korea, or anywhere else for that matter. And I don't think he intends to or ever has intended to. I think he's playing a different game because certainly he knows that any major aggression towards South Korea or the US will result in his own demise. And that would mean no more visits from retired NBA badboys.
     One group of people who don't seem nervous at all is the South Koreans. For them it all seems par for the course and life goes on as always. One of my students told me that someone, I think it was a politician, was upset because more Koreans were talking about the beginning of the baseball season than the threat from the North, something that struck me as both funny and rather expected. I tend to think that since the Southerners have lived with this sort of thing for a long time--the Korean War has been on "pause" for 60 years now--they must be rather numb to the constant posturing that comes from the North. About a week ago, I asked my students if anyone was nervous about North Korea and just one girl raised her hand--and that was one more than raised their hand last time I asked the question--and she told me she wasn't nervous about a war but instead was nervous that NK would do something on a smaller scale, like shelling one of the many island off the west coast or attempting to sink another ship.
     So it seems no one here is nervous about any major aggression from the North. And until they get nervous, neither will I. All I know is that the weather is finally getting a bit warmer and baseball has just started--two very welcome arrivals.