 "The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses." - Malcolm X
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 It is a clear sunny spring day. The Japanese festival of Hanami, the celebration of the beauty of flowers, is in full swing as people shake out of their heavy winter coats and enjoy the season of renewal and rebirth. Sakura petals drift gently down from promenades and parks onto the picnics of friends and families enjoying the warm weather. It is a time for new life to grow out of the long and harsh winter and the darkness of days. Along the river promenade is the endless hustle and pitter patter of people of all walks of life appreciating the flowers in bloom.
 "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." - George Orwell 1984
 What is more dangerous – to be in a cage where you can see the bars, or one where you can’t. Is it more dangerous to know that you are being controlled or to believe that you are free to choose while being just as constrained?
 Our world is different to that of our parents. While they were the first generation to pioneer the internet and begin the information era, we were born citizens. While they were the generation that maintained tradition, we are increasingly challenging old ideas. Ideas about what constitutes love, what constitutes marriage, and even ideas about what constitutes ownership.
 Call me paranoid but airports always make me nervous. There is the ever-present fear that you might have forgotten something. That you might be late. That you might miss your flight having to go through yet another security checkpoint. And there was that one time when I was 19 when I was held in an interrogation room in Incheon International Airport before my flight.
 When it comes to politics you can never judge a book by its cover and 20-year-old Sam Purchas is a great example why. Standing at a lanky 6 foot 3 and dressed in a bright flowery suit that looks like a Coachella attendee’s LSD fuelled vision of ‘smart casual’, Sam looks more like a psychedelic hippie than a Randian right-winger. When he’s not singing bass in a Barbershop Quartet, or playing Doctor Who in this year’s Capping Show, Sam serves as the president of Young ACT at Otago.
 You’ve made it. After three years subsisting on a diet of Mi Goreng noodles, the cheeky seven-dollar fat bird, and too much caffeine, you’ve proven that you’re ready to take your place in the world with a fancy piece of paper, and a crippling student loan. You’ve had some great times, some horrific times, and some half formed blurry ones pieced together the next day from your snap story. Now what?
 Time is a wheel. Being someone of Korean descent who represents New Zealand on the JET Programme (Japanese Exchange and Teaching meant to improve international relations), living in Japan is a surreal experience. On one hand, their ancestors conquered mine and instituted an oppressive police state in the 20th century, doing things like gunning down school children for singing the national anthem in public. On the other hand, their descendants’ taxes now pay my salary and I teach their children’s children English in an effort to show them the international world. I try not to get caught up in ancestral grudges.
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IsaacBorn somewhere between the old world of Korea and the new world of New Zealand Isaac is an award winning writer, teacher of literature and nomad currently residing in Nanjing. Archives
November 2020
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