LETTER FROM THE EDITOR - VOL. 14
KCCNYC Monthly - July 2025
By Eun Byoul Oh
New York is finally getting the summer weather, it’s hot and steamy. Summer brings excitement for everyone as we are ready to take some time off and travel with family, and gather around food to share the love and affection.
I hope you get to enjoy some Korean summer food such as Naengmyeon (냉면), Bingsu (빙수), and Mookbap (묵밥) Korean Acorn jelly in cold broth with your family this summer. If you haven’t tried them before, it would be a special treat, and a great way to interact with Korean culture.
Yummy Korean summer food :)
On a different note, our team thought about what to focus on for the month of July, as July is a rather quiet month for Korea—aside from the Constitution Day and the Armistice Day, which brought the ceasefire for the Korean War. However, as we observe the world around us, we thought it would be important for us to cover WWII in our Moment in History, in addition to the cool summer contents the team has prepared for us.
The world is living in a turbulent time. There are so many conflicts and wars happening: the U.S. - Iran conflict, Israel-Palestine conflict, Russia-Ukraine conflict, Pakistan-India conflict and ongoing conflicts in the world that we aren’t hearing about often enough.
Map of current global conflicts by ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data)
We all face conflict. Conflict doesn’t benefit anyone, particularly armed conflict, except perhaps, those that actually manufacture and sell the weapons. As countries and groups of people fight each other, grapple for power, vie for influence, push their agendas forward, people die. Sometimes masses of people die. They die from the weapons used in conflict, they die because they are targeted, they die from exhaustion and starvation as they are displaced from their homes. Those that don’t die are traumatized for their lifetime. These are the ordinary people. The ordinary people who are losing their loved ones, their homes, and everything they ever had. The young soldiers who did not have the decision making power or who did not have any say in going to wars. As one of our students said in class, perhaps the instantaneous social media circulation of images will reveal the true face of war to help us bring it to a slow halt.
But leaders still put themselves in conflict. And people with power still fear and react to those that are different than them, wanting to erase the differences instead of finding our collective similarities. In the presence of more major world-scale conflict, we ruminate on how conflict is not only a disaster for the involved nations, but for the entire world. The world is now completely intertwined and it is impossible for any nation to completely isolate themself. The global community is not free from the war atrocities that any nation may look away from and directly support.
We recap WWII to reflect on the past that we have maybe forgotten - the atrocious acts of mankind, that we as a global community should not choose to repeat.
As I close this month’s Editor’s note, I think of those who are suffering in our country right now: those who are in the LGBTQIA community, families of immigrants and immigrants. I remind myself again what Pope Francis said, “We are one world in which we want to cooperate at [a] multilateral level, and in which we do not want to build walls but to tear walls down, a world in which everybody should see greater prosperity, wealth, honour and dignity.” We hope KCCNYC monthly is one of the doorways to bridges for the readers—we will continue to bring the voices of social minorities to our newsletter, and be vigilant actors in and observers of the world. We hope that your participation in KCCNYC activities strengthens our communities and brings the chance to understand those who we are different from.
With Solidarity,
Eun Byoul Oh
