Скачать или смотреть Personal log, stardate 2022.350: Pachinko and gratitude

I just finished the TV miniseries Pachinko on Apple TV+. One of the major themes reiterated throughout the film is that parents try desperately to protect their children from the worst and to give their children the best. As a parent may say to a child, “Avoid the horrors I’ve seen, and take the opportunities I never had.” But, what if the child grows up never appreciating the privileges they possess?

In episode 3, one dialogue on the generation gap unfolds on this topic, when grandmother Sunja asks grandson Solomon to try to tell the difference between Korean rice and Japanese rice when hosted by Geum-ja, another elderly woman.

Sunja: “Taste the rice again.”
[Silence.]
Geum-ja: “Look at that! Young people don’t know the difference.”
Sunja: “This is rice grown in our country.”
Solomon: “How can you tell?”
Sunja: “It’s nuttier. A bit sweeter, with a harder chew to it. Back then, white rice was a luxury.”
Geum-ja: “We grew it, but they took it all.”
Sunja: “But now we eat white rice at every meal and we don’t even notice it.”
Guem-ja: “And you think that’s a good thing?”

After this episode, I had a sudden thought about my two boys. What if they grow up to be equally ungrateful? What if they take everything they had growing up for granted, never satisfied and always wanting more, more, more? Maybe I need to preserve some form of planned poverty, some form of systematic injustice they can experience so that they might gain perspective on their lives. Maybe the ghettos in America serve a greater purpose.

But then, once I finished the whole series, I thought more about the utopian future implied by stardate, imagined by the producers and writers of Star Trek, summarized in Picard’s immortal line, “A lot has changed in the past 300 years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.” I realized that teaching my children empathy in a peaceful world—teaching them gratitude in the midst of plenty—is not optional; this parental task is necessary if the utopian future is to be realized and sustained.

#stardate