i slept through an entire Martial Law declaration (story time)

Updated: 02/02/2025

tw: politics and depression

this one will be quite short because if i’m being honest, i didn’t even know what Martial Law was when the president of Korea declared it…..

the calmest chaos ensued at around 10:30 PM on December 3rd. my roommate and i were preparing to go to sleep when all of a sudden she said:

“the president just declared Martial Law…” 

to which i responded with:

“what’s that?”

i didn’t process the seriousness of the situation until later on. i didn’t take it seriously at the moment because everyone in the international student Yonsei group chat i was in was making jokes and not taking it seriously. i should’ve known better and realized that’s just gen z being gen z…

if you don't know, Martial Law is a coupe. the military gains full control of the government, the public loses a lot, if not all, of their freedom rights, curfews are implemented, all that crazy stuff. i feel like i should have known more and done more research but it was literally almost the middle of the night, i was tired, and had a 9:00 AM the next day. i also knew that my professor would talk about it in the morning.

the next day i woke up at around 7:30 AM and Martial Law was already lifted……. everyone and their moms were appalled, especially the netizens in Korea. our professor was talking about how Martial Law had not been enforced since the 80s so everyone was shocked. according to the media, the president’s goal was to showcase a sense of power and his capabilities, but that plan was poorly executed. that’s just what most of the media said at the time though i’m not trying to be all political or anything.

this was an interesting time because the elections in the U.S. had just finished and everyone was disappointed with the results, so it felt like the world was ending at that point. i think that’s another reason why i wasn’t phased by the whole Martial Law fiasco. i was already in a place where i had little to no hope and i was not going to be surprised by more news about corrupt politics. ew so depressing. 

anyway, that’s just my thoughts on the declaration but this is probably not the best blog to read on it, i was just there for it and people asked me how it was when i came back home so i thought i’d write about it.