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Life & Times Transcript
07/19/06 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- Should North Korea be cajoled or controlled? Local Korean Americans respond differently to tensions in their homeland. Charles Kim>> The North Korean region is not the kind of region that you can trust and I'm not sure you can make common sense with them. Grace Yoo>> I believe in the old adage that you can catch more flies with honey. Val Zavala>> And then, UCLA's incoming class is only two percent Black. Some say something is wrong. Others say it's not a problem. These stories and more on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val Zavala>> Los Angeles is home to the largest Korean community outside of South Korea. So when North Korea launched their missile tests on July 4, they watched with particular concern. How does their history influence their response to the missile tests and what do they think of the growing tensions in the region? Jim Hill went to Koreatown to find out. Jim Hill>> The photographs in his collection have yellowed after more than fifty years, but memories of the Korean War, South Korean, American, and other allies who fought and died are fresh for retired South Korean Army Colonel Bong Keon Kim. Colonel Bong Keon Kim>> We shouldn't forget about it. My heart breaks because the younger Korean generations are forgetting about our past and the war. Jim Hill>> Wounded four times, the highly-decorated veteran sees communist North Korea as a constant military threat that cannot be trusted or reasoned with. Dae Yoon's family has a sharply different view. The Korean American's grandfather is missing from this picture which includes relatives who fled North Korea. Yoon's grandfather is still in the north, but Yoon says he has no idea if he is still alive. That is one reason Yoon puts his faith in negotiation to end North Korea's missile and nuclear programs and supply the renegade nation's people with food, energy and financial aid. Dae Yoon>> I see that North Korea is kind of a plane with a broken engine, so I believe soft landing is very important to protect the people inside the plane or protect the people that the broken airplane will be landing on. Jim Hill>> Grace Yoo is half the age of the retired Army colonel. She came to the United States with her family when she was three and now works as an attorney. Grace Yoo>> I'm very much American in my thinking, being able to talk back to my parents and make my issues known. Jim Hill>> Part of a younger and perhaps more trusting generation, she says she is not worried by the actions of North Korea's erratic leader, Kim Jong il. Grace Yoo>> When Kim Jong il decided to put those missiles out on July 4, I pretty much understood it as his wanting to come back to the table to negotiate. Jim Hill>> These Korean Americans typify the divisions in their Los Angeles community after North Korea test-fired seven missiles, one of them a long-range Taepodong-2. [Film Clip] Jim Hill>> It's a three-stage upgrade of this earlier Taepodong-1. George Bush>> "What these firing of the rockets have done is, they've isolated themselves further and that's sad for the people of North Korea." Jim Hill>> Colonel Kim has a harsher view. Colonel Bong Keon Kim>> This missile test is part of their evil plans to unify the South and North with their military powers. I am displeased with South Korea's passive reaction to it. Jim Hill>> Korea remains cut in two by this demilitarized zone which extends more than one hundred fifty miles northeast from the 38th Parallel. South Korean and North Korean sentries stand only yards apart in the border post of Panmunjong, a strange display that is both ceremony and serious. [Film Clip] Jim Hill>> United States troops and South Korean forces routinely conduct war games like these just south of the border while, to the north at its Yongbyong power plant, the communist regime defends what it calls its right to manufacture the plutonium necessary for nuclear weapons. The Taepondong-2 reportedly has the potential to carry atomic warheads as far as North America. Here in southern California, an estimated three hundred fifty thousand Korean Americans live or work in communities like Los Angeles Koreatown. Charles Kim>> Pretty much, more than I think Korea, the people here in the Korean American community are more conservative than liberal. Jim Hill>> Kim estimates that thirty to forty percent of Korean Americans have at least secondhand knowledge of life in North Korea. They have relatives who either have lived or still live under the Stalinist regime. Charles Kim>> I don't think any Korean Americans trust North Korea, but they see North Korea as kind of a brother who needs to be taken care of. Jim Hill>> Community leaders say many Korean Americans have supported the so-called Sunshine Policies of former South Korean President, Kim Dae Jung. The idea seems simple. Warm North Korea with aid and other goodwill gestures and the communist regime would melt. But the missile tests have blocked the sun for Charles Kim. Charles Kim>> They try to be nice to -- okay, they're starving. We have to support our brothers and sisters in North Korea. However, you know, the North Korean regime is not the kind of regime that you can trust or make common sense with, so many are disappointed especially now after the missile incident. No way. Jim Hill>> Colonel Kim agrees. The North must be punished, he said, with sanctions harsh enough to cripple the regime of Kim Jong il. But Grace Yoo says Sunshine must be given more time. Grace Yoo>> Personally, I do because I believe in the old adage that you catch more flies with honey. It's true. When you sweeten the pot and make things better for a person, they're more likely to come in versus pushing them aside and saying no, no, no. Jim Hill>> Korean Americans are strongly bound on one point, the hope that the Korean Peninsula can reunite as a single nation under a democratic government and a free market economy. Grace Yoo>> Even as a child, you know, the songs that you learned just like "America The Beautiful", I also learned Korean songs about reunification for North and South. It's a deep desire for Koreans to have the Peninsula reunified. Dae Yoon>> I believe that reunification is a long-time goal, but I think at this point, the more important thing is to make peace possible, make reconciliation, make negotiation, make talk. Charles Kim>> Everybody in the Korean American community wants to achieve reunification and they don't want any unification through the means of North Korea taking over South Korea and meaning communism Korea. Nobody wants that and nobody wants to have another war, so the key words are how can we achieve peaceful and democratic unification in Korea? Jim Hill>> But the hope remains just that and their standoff spanning more than fifty years, sentries from the North and sentries from the South, haven't given an inch. I'm James Hill for Life and Times. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> It's a stunning statistic. At UCLA, the incoming freshman class will be only two percent Black. That's right. Two percent African American. The decline is a result of Proposition 209 which eliminated race in the admissions process. But are the UCLA numbers the whole story? For some opinions, we brought three people together. Joe Hicks moderates our conversation. He's Vice President of CommUnity Advocates, Inc. Richard Sander is a Professor at UCLA Law School who has published a study of affirmative action, and Mandla Kayise is President of the UCLA Black Alumni Association and an education consultant. Joe Hicks>> Well, guys, it looks like this fall, there will be only ninety-six Black students being possibly enrolled in UCLA. That's only two percent of the incoming freshman class. I think the real question is what is that all about? What's contributing to that dip in this year's freshman enrollment? Mandla, what's going on? Mandla Kayise>> I don't think there's any question that Proposition 209 has had a negative impact on African American admissions at UCLA in particular. But I think also UCLA's admissions process, their application of what is supposed to be a comprehensive review, continues to rely overwhelmingly on grades and test scores. We think it poorly contextualizes the social conditions in the schools. A lot of the problems that we're all aware of that are happening in schools that are disproportionately impacting African American students are not being fully taken into account and the consequences that UCLA is admitting the lowest percentage of African American applicants that it has ever admitted. This is part of the problem. Joe Hicks>> Rick, I think you probably see it a little different. Is there a problem here? Richard Sander>> Well, in a lot of ways, the UC system and UCLA are doing a great job. The Proposition 209, of course, phased out race-conscious admissions ten years ago. That puts a big constraint, both absolute and competitive, between UC system and other schools that still use affirmative action aggressively. Within that context, the UC system has extended its admissions criteria and they've succeeded in increasing minority enrollment system-wide. That's something that's really lost in this focus on UCLA, that system-wide minority enrollment is going up. It's also really important to keep in mind that low-income enrollment is going up. UCLA has more Pell Grant students than any other college in the country and that's a really important achievement. Joe Hicks>> Why don't explain what Pell Grants are? Richard Sander>> Well, Pell Grants are grants that are eligible for low-income students to help them with college. Something like two out of every five UCLA students are getting Pell Grants. That's telling you that the UCLA's admissions process is doing a really unusually strong job of identifying people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Joe Hicks>> So let's get into it. You guys sort of made opening comments here. Black admissions are down at UC Berkeley, down at UC Los Angeles, down at UC Riverside, but up at all the other UC campuses in the system. So what's the problem? Mandle Kayise>> Well, the problem is that UCLA has a responsibility as do the other UCs to pursue diversity, to look at academic achievement within a certain context in terms of the socio-conditions in which students are educated. Their personal or achievement in life challenges has also been included as factors and UCLA has a responsibility to apply those factors and to do it to the best of its ability with diversity as, we believe, a valid objective. Richard Sander>> There's a fundamental problem that universities have to deal with, which is that there's a huge gap in achievement when people finish high school between Blacks and whites and between whites and Hispanics. There's also a gap between Asians and whites. We might get into that one too. But that enormously constrains what a responsible university can do. The big story that doesn't get reported at all is that the number of Blacks and Hispanics enrolled in the UC system overall is the same or higher than it was in the mid-1990s before Proposition 209 was passed. That's an incredible achievement when you consider the academic achievement gap that the schools have now been forced to deal with. Now it's true that they've been redistributed from Berkeley and UCLA to some of the other UC campuses, but that's actually a good thing for the students involved because that means that there's a smaller academic gap between a typical minority student going to a UC school and his classmates. There's a lot of research indicating that students do worse when they're in an environment where their credentials are really mismatched with those of their classmates. If there's a big academic gap between Black students and white students, Black students have less chance of graduating and they're less likely to stick with things like Science majors where the competition is harder. So having those students redistributed as we've seen over the last several years from the so-called flagship schools to some of the less elite schools is a positive thing. It's not something that we should be ranting about. Mandla Kayise>> It's not positive. It's irrelevant. It's absolutely irrelevant. Richard Sander>> It's not absolutely irrelevant. Mandla Kayise>> The achievement level of African American students at a UC school are affected by a variety of factors and UCLA has absolutely no right nor responsibility to take those results into account when they are admitting their students. Richard Sander>> That's absolutely wrong. Mandla Kayise>> The overriding obligation that the institution has is to look at the achievement level of those students, to look at the context in which they achieved, and to give them the opportunity to attend the university should their achievement level and the conditions in which they achieved merit the opportunity to do so. We believe that UCLA has not done that fairly for those students who are achieving under adverse conditions. Richard Sander>> Then what you ought to do is, first of all, show some data that the entering numbers of minorities coming to UCLA are higher than those of whites and Asians. You can't do that because they're actually lower. So it's pretty hard to argue there's determination if Black and Hispanic numbers are lower. Secondly, it's completely wrong to say that we can't take into account future achievement. The whole point of admitting a freshman class is to try to select those students who are going to benefit most from what UCLA has to offer. If a student comes in, struggles for two or three years, drops out and doesn't finish a degree, that's a disservice both to that student and it's a disserve to the UC system and the California taxpaying public. Joe Hicks>> We're running out of time, we're running out of time. So give me about a fifteen second take on what you'd like to see happen. Mandla Kayise>> I think it's incredibly paternalistic and subjective to suggest that you're doing a student a favor by not admitting him to UCLA and I think a lot of students and their families would disagree with that. But I will say that the overriding obligation beyond looking at future achievement as a factor is to look at fairness in terms of providing an opportunity. Richard Sander>> What we ought to focus on is what's happening in the UC system as a whole, which is an incredibly encouraging positive story. We ought to be focusing on the great job UCLA is doing in reaching out to low-income students and, most importantly, to address the things that you're concerned about, we ought to address fixing K-12 and trying to bridge this minority white gap in achievement. Mandla Kayise>> So you don't believe that African Americans are disadvantaged to any degree -- Joe Hicks>> -- okay, we are flat out of time. Look, we could sit here and do this all day long and it would be great to maybe come back and do it again. This could be an ongoing discussion. Thanks, both of you, for coming in. Well argued on both your parts. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot. We'll be back. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> Okay, let's admit it. There are times when even we adults would love to get down and dirty. Well, now there's a perfect place, for kids at least, to wallow in the mud. Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, takes us to the Puddle Park. Roger Cooper>> Cleanliness is next to Godliness, we're told. Not in this place. Here in this spot in the heart of Huntington Beach, mud rules and the name of the game is getting dirty. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> What is this place? Mark Hoxie>> This is a playground for kids approximately five to twelve year olds, but we don't turn anybody away because of their age. It's just that we're more appropriate for that age group. Roger Cooper>> Adventure Playground is operated by the city of Huntington Beach each summer. Mark Hoxie may be the city's Program Coordinator for Community Services, but you can tell he's a kid at heart. Mark Hoxie>> We have a tire swing. They slide down the tire. It goes down the cable for about fifty feet or so and they bounce around. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> Being here is like entering Mark Twain's mind, to watch Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky at play. Mark Hoxie>> We have a pond with rafts in it. They push themselves around kind of like Tom Sawyer. We have a rope bridge going over the pond. We have a building area where the kids can check out hammers and saws and then we also have a mud slide which they slide down a hill. We squirt them with a hose as they go down and then they land in a hole of muddy water. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> What do you think the fun of this is to a kid? Mark Hoxie>> It's a place where kids can do things that they can't do anywhere else. In Orange County and Los Angeles County, there's not a whole lot of open land in the cities, so it's a place where they can go and get dirty. They can build with hammers and nails and the parents don't worry about it. Roger Cooper>> Everyone needs a chance to hit the nail on the head. [Film Clip] Roger Cooper>> This is done by the city? Mark Hoxie>> Yeah, it's part of the Community Services Department of Huntington Beach. Roger Cooper>> How long have you been here? Mark Hoxie>> It's been in this location since 1983 and the original one, which was right across the street from us, was started in about 1974. Roger Cooper>> Do you know why it got started? Mark Hoxie>> From what I've seen, there was a man from Europe who had noticed in the wreckage of World War II that the kids were playing in that and having as much fun with that as they were having with their toys, so he came up with the idea of having a place where there was just junk to play with. Roger Cooper>> How do they get back home once they get dirty? Mark Hoxie>> We have a shower and we have a couple of changing rooms. They're not real fancy, but they can at least get rinsed off, a little bit cleaner, a little drier and then not mess up the cars as they go home. Roger Cooper>> When you were a kid, would you like to have had this? Mark Hoxie>> I grew up in Huntington Beach here and I was aware of the original one, but I was never able to get over there. I wish I had because it was a lot different than this. I came here to this one as a volunteer. I was about nineteen years old and we had a great time. I was one of those adults who was doing all the kid stuff at the time. Roger Cooper>> So you've been in the mud yourself? Mark Hoxie>> Yes. We also have a tradition on the last day that the staff will go around and do all the stuff and have a little crazy time. Roger Cooper>> It's the old swimming hole that most of us had or would love to have had when we were kids, and it's alive and well in Huntington Beach. In Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> This is butterfly season and there's no better place to see them than here at the Butterfly Pavilion at the Natural History Museum where they've gathered together more than two dozen species of gorgeous butterflies from across America, and no one knows more about them than Brent, the bug guy, Karner. Brent Karner>> I guess because they call me Brent, the bug guy, you pretty much get the idea that I like all bugs. Butterflies are great, though, because in our society people don't tend to like the insects and their close relatives very much. But butterflies are exempt from those hateful feelings we have about a lot of the other insects and their close relatives like spiders and scorpions. I can actually use butterflies to attract people not just to get them to see butterflies, but then to talk to them about other intriguing issues that relate to other insects. So that's why the butterflies to me -- I often call them the spokesbugs for all other animals that have sort of a hard crunchy outer bit. I find all the butterflies in here interesting. Of course, over the summer, you will have about thirty to thirty-five different species of butterflies. They're all native to the United States. About half of those that we bring in are actually native to California. Some of the neatest ones that people will see are some of the moths we bring in. People always love seeing some of the large giant silk moths. We bring in things like the Luna Moth or the Cecropia Moth, but you can also see our state butterfly here which is a hard one to see, the California Dogface. They're darn pretty and it's easy to talk to people about butterflies. A cockroach pavilion doesn't work as good. One of the things that people get to experience when they come in here is just sort of how a habitat works, the butterflies again being the central theme to it. The butterflies are doing the general things they do during the day, whether it be feeding from the flowers, just flying about, doing some territorial stuff, looking for plants to lay their eggs on and even mating. Kids, I think, love butterflies almost more than anybody. This is a real family oriented exhibit. The kids love just seeing the colors flying around. They love to chase them a bit. Adults like it too just because it's sort of a nice peaceful place they can just come in. The adults are usually the ones sitting on the benches like me, and the kids are the ones running around on the paths looking at all the different butterflies that they can find. Kids also like it because it's got a bit of a scavenger hunt feel to it. [Film Clip] Brent Karner>> They're coming here to see what they think are pretty insects. They don't consider them ugly or creepy or, most of all, dangerous. But what they do find out is that they are being placed in a cage with them and there are, in some cases, very poisonous insects. That ends up surprising people. A lot of the bright colors that people like and think are pretty and make them really angels on wings are the result of having eaten very poisonous plants when they were caterpillars. You wouldn't want to pop one of these in your mouth. You'd be pretty regretful if you did. Some of my favorites in here are actually the ones that we're allowed to breed in the facility, some of our local things, because that allows us to talk about that it's not just the adult butterfly that makes the butterfly what a butterfly is. It's their younger forms too, the caterpillars and the pupae. [Film Clip] Brent Karner>> I think the kids really like the big ones. Some of the larger Swallowtails like the Giant Swallowtail or some of the real metallic looking ones like the Pipevine Swallowtails or Spicebush Swallowtails. But I think the all-time favorite hands-down would be the big Giant Silk Moths, specifically the greenish Luna Moth from the East Coast. I think this is an even bigger experience than most people would expect. Every time you come, it's a different experience. You'll see different plants. You'll see different butterflies. And you'll sort of see how the great circle of life actually works. It makes me really happy when I know that this exhibit has put a smile on somebody's face. Not just the kids, but the adults too. I know that here at the museum, we're touching them in a certain way and we're getting them to understand these animals and understand the environment and, if a little bit of that follows them out of here and gets them to think about what they might need to do at their own home or in their own environment to make it a happy place for butterflies and other animals, then we're really doing our part. Val Zavala>> Now if you can handle something creepier than butterflies, you'll be glad to know that the Natural History Museum will be filling its pavilion with spiders and bugs later in the year, some very large bugs. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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