This is my August fool's day valedictory.  I wrote a daily column from June to the end of August, a quixotic endeavor.  But there is nothing quixotic about Guomeimei, a Beijing Film Academy grad.  The 23-year created a stir when she flaunted a lavish lifestyle in 2011 while claiming relationship with the Red Cross; the NGO had a 90 percent decline in its donations the year that followed.  She was a skilled but sly mistress, also a gambling addict, recently arrested for illegal online betting during the World Cup.

 

It is Ms. Guo's imagination that attracts us.  She muscled willpower over the power of fear.  The politics of suspicion abounds.  On the MH17 crash, after fears' frenzy of trampled evidence to cover-up accountability, the Netherland's PM Rutte said that it now appears "fortunately that more was done after the disaster than we thought until now."  Local authorities carried out "an intensive search in the area with 800 volunteers, and there were many bodies recovered in those (first) days."

 

A 300-truck convoy of humanitarian relief bound for Donets'k was not allowed passage by Kiev on fear that the convoy might be carrying arms for the separatist, or worst, an advanced wedge ahead of a Russian invasion.

 

The US found allies in the Philippines and Japan in foisting fear over China's designs in its waters.  It coincides with the US Pivot Turn strategy into the Far East away from the oil flares of the Middle East, to save the Pentagon's lost face in its massive mishandling of the War in Iraq.

 

Japan released a white paper identifying Russia, DPRK, and China as threats to its national security.  Shinzo Abe is the US Pentagon's darling; he got the US State Department's support in the contested four islands of Kiril Skyle Ostrova that Moscow took over from Imperial Japan after Potsdam and WWII.

 

Meanwhile, the Philippines' maritime claim v. China showed regrettably a double-speak when its Pentagon-guided proposal suggested a three-step process for claimants: 1) a stop on any activities in the area, 2) a dialogue between claimants, 3) a final recourse to international arbitration.  The Philippines recently jumped into the third step behind the apron of the US Fleet and the diplomatic shield of ASEAN before the previous steps.

 

South Korea's President Park Geun-hye whose political "allure" faded after the ferry sinking of MV Sewol when she shed tears to apologize for the local Coast Guards' failure to respond quickly to save lives, was asked to respond to the news that DPRK tested a missile into the East Sea (aka, Sea of Japan) that flew farther than previous ones, to protest the joint four-decade military maneuvers (saber rattling to DPRK) of US-SoKor forces.

 

Park decided that it was time to scrape the joint exercises, get Pyongyang's ear, so folks in the Korean Peninsula, from Jeju to in-land Yanji and Mudanjiang in China's Manchuria, could cordially start talking to each other.  Kim Jung-un has reunification of the Koreas high in his agenda, but the military heads of DPRK, SoKor, and the US occupying forces would not hear of it. 

 

There is too much investment in armaments, and medaled chest boards of selfhood, in maintaining the ideology of conflict and the politics of fear to even consider a practical possibility.  The four-decade annual large joint exercises are purely for defensive reasons.  Right.  Track where the money goes and "defense" takes on a different meaning.

 

What I just described re Pres. Park's decision did not happen.  It was my Guomeimei at work.  But it is not too farfetched from it ever happening.   Celine Dion indefinitely cancelled all scheduled performances and tours upon discovering that her husband is dying of cancer.  She halted a process already in motion to reconsider her options.  If you have ever driven with a lady navigator on the passenger side, it is the female's option to re-decide on instinct.

 

Micronesians' inability to plan is often bewailed; they would rather just lounge on the catch of the day without worry about the prospects of tomorrow, some say.  Political entities do show fancy consultant-written long-term plans but are unable to project themselves farther than the requirements of the day.

 

Shortsightedness, it is, but beyond the bewailing, I say that it is more human to inhabit a moment's effulgent space than in competing in the race of time to be at some place to chalk up an achievement.  Try rootedness in place.  The value of planning is in its ability to give one the courage to care for the here-and-now by attending to its ebullience.  It does not contractually tie anyone to behave in a certain way just because a long-range "plan" is set to "law".  Push islanders and watch what they do; Lino Olopai "acts" this way naturally!

 

Indeed, Park Geun-hye could say, "OK, we've conducted 60 years of shooting wars.  Let's try another way to relate to one another," then travels to Pyongyang sans fanfare.  I wonder what Obama and the Pentagon would say if that happened?