Hockey and Syria

My muscles have been sore all week.  Playing hockey has been taking its toll on me.  It's been worth it though.  I hadn't realized how much I had missed playing the game.  I feel much more Canadian these days now that I am playing hockey.  But it has been taking taking a lot out of me.  This week I played two days in a row with my 'team', and after each of my short shifts on the ice, I was huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf.  I broke my collar bone in grade two and when I was young and I would run or exercise a lot, my collar bone would ache where it had been broken.  It hadn't ached like that for a long time, so I had forgotten about it.  But as I was playing hockey this week, after a particularly tiring shift, the ache returned.  So ya, it's quite a workout.
I've also been thinking a lot more about hockey lately.  I watch a lot more NHL highlights, trying to pick up tips on how play my position better; my friend Sarah, who's from Thunder Bay, sent me a link to a great CBC radio documentary on hockey; and I've even been dreaming about playing hockey lately.
It's also interesting to be on a 'team' with other Koreans. (I put 'team' in parentheses because I'm not sure we are really a team or if I'm a part of it yet).  As with many things, the Koreans that I play with take it quite seriously.  They take every chance they get to give everyone a quick coaching lesson.  Honestly, I don't mind the extra advice, but I can't help but compare our team to my idea of a similar beer-league-team in Canada.  I can't imagine that the Canadian team would invest as much money and energy as the Koreans I play with do. But that's the Korean way.  When they're going to do something, they do it completely.
Here's another example of Koreans taking things seriously: Just down the street from our school, a ping-pong hall was built.  It's a small building with five or six ping-pong tables in it and it's fun to watch the ping-pong players practicing fiercely inside as we walk by.  Well, one day, some of our Korean co-teachers thought it would be fun to sign up to join the ping-pong club there just as something to do after school.  They came back and told us that there was no way they were going to join because of the price.  They told us it was something outrageous, like 200 bucks a month to be a part of it.

Aside from hockey, a lot of my thoughts have been on the news lately.  CNN is the only purely English channel on the TVs in our apartments and I have gotten into the habit of checking out the news on CNN every morning and evening.
Lately, I've been particularly interested in what is happening in the country of Syria right now.  There, the dictator, Bashar al-Assad, has basically declared war on his own people after there were protests against his rule beginning in January 2011.  In the past couple months, numerous people have been killed daily by the Syrian army.
I am drawn to this news story and I can't help but follow the events in Syria because I can't imagine what it is like for the people who are being attacked by their own government. I think they must feel completely helpless.  I've heard that the there aren't enough doctors to treat the wounded, and that hospitals have run out of medicine anyway.
I'm sure many Syrians, as well as people outside of Syria, myself included, are wondering why the outside world has not done anything about the Syrian government's crackdown on its people.  The United Nations has met to address this issue, but a movement to intervene in Syria was vetoed by Russia.  Russia, apparently, has close political ties to Syria and isn't ready to condemn its government's attack of its people.  My response to this is disbelief that a country would value its political connections with a government over the lives of thousands of people which are being ended by this government.  I start to wonder, how much do peoples lives really matter to people in positions of power who have to make decisions such as the ones the members of the UN are making regarding Syria.  I understand they are in a difficult position, but I wonder how they can simply watch people being killed, knowing they can help the situation.
And yet, I've also considered the opposing side of this debate; the side of the debate that asks, why is it the responsibility of outside countries to intervene on the affairs of one countries' problems?  Shouldn't Syria be left alone to figure out their own problems?  Similar protests and unrest happened in Libya not too long ago and in that situation the UN did intervene and take out the government.  But was that the right thing to do?  Has it helped Libya move toward peaceful elections?
I haven't thought enough about this issue to know the answers to these questions, but this line of thinking doesn't go very far in my mind.  When peoples' lives are being lost like they are in Syria, I do believe that the global community has a responsibility to try to put an end to it.  In situations such as this, I believe that we need to understand how trivial the man-made borders of our countries are and to realize that we are responsible for each other simply because we are all humans.  I hope and pray that soon there will be a resolution to the unrest in Syria which will put an end to the brutal bloodshed of innocent people.

Thanks for reading,
Michael