Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: sociology

  • On Watching “Adolescence” (2025) – Netflix Season 1

    This Netflix drama series does not focus on an activist narrative that many might passionately debate from various political or social perspectives. Instead, it explores how something unimaginably tragic can affect anyone or any family, regardless of their socioeconomic status, race, or cultural background. Committing a crime is not solely the domain of a degenerate or disturbed mind; rather, it can be seen as a sickness influenced by a combination of social factors and the inherent predispositions of individuals. And yes, this reality includes all of us.

    Here is an adolescent boy from a hardworking family whose father may have a temper but is kind and understanding and has a strong responsibility for his family. Hardly a likely candidate for the head of the dysfunctional family contributed to producing a psychopathic killer. Having a temper doesn’t mean you are automatically attuned to criminal minds. To that effect, the father of the boy is neither a saint nor a sinner, and his son’s problem is not of family but of peers; it’s from peer pressure under heavy intoxication with social media where your worth is valued by lookism and agism vying for popularity as key to success. A loser is an Incel whose insecurity is forced by the number of likes destined for a public whipping boy or walking sandbag. Yeah, it’s easy to label anyone who is not within a safe zone of being accepted, and you become a new outcast. If you are a woman outcast, then you are a new witch to be persecuted. 

    The problem with the boy here is his consequence and punishment, but that should not be relegated to the family. To ostracize the family of the sinner is a time-honored practice that never changes, just as there’s no new thing under the sun. While the drama shows the brutally realistic portrayal of the crime, the doer, and the family without overt display of emotions or elaborated scripts, it does not give the boy light of redemption in the person of the psychologist interviewing the boy. I cannot help but think that she’s there to get what she wants, which is to extort confession that he did kill the girl, and that is why he did it, not trying to help him cure the mind disease. She does not seem to be happy with herself either. 

    It was mind-disturbing and painful to see how the police handled the boy and the preponderance of shock that his family encountered on what might have been one of those ordinary mornings. Seeing his father criticizing himself for not being perfect broke my heart. Yet, no one is perfect; he is a good father with a strong sense of responsibility for his family and a good heart. That’s good enough. You see, bad things can happen to good people. Dad, please don’t blame yourself. You are a good father: good night and sweet dreams. 

  • ‘The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church’ by Rachel L. Swarns – Book Essay


    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    I have always thought of the Catholic Church in the U.S. as a league of immigrant churches founded by the faithful of the old world diasporas uprooted in the New World. The American Catholic Church is, in a way, an outpost of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, with its offsprings sprouting and flourishing in their ethnic enclaves, thus resulting in less spiritually cohesive, culturally solidifying characteristics in the form of different ethnic Catholic communities within the Church in the U.S. Perhaps that might be one of the reasons that there are so few black Catholics, excluding the immigrant blacks from the overseas because the Church ignored their existence as human beings except for their labor as a lucrative resource to expand their organizational dominance.


    Swarns is also mad and sad about the cruel truth about the Jesuits, whose motto was to educate the souls to train as God’s soldiers were the leaders of the slave trading in 19th century America in efforts to create America’s finest Jesuit high-education establishment called the Georgetown University. The number 272 signifies the number of blacks traded as slaves to fund the university’s administration in zealous ambition to build the Jesuit Empire in the New World. While Pope George XVI condemned slavery in his apostolic Church in 1839, blindsided by the expansionist vision, the American-born and bred Jesuits continued to ship out the blacks in their care to Louisiana by disintegrating the black families and communities to form their cultural identities and heritage.


    Catholicism is a family religion because it is usually inherited through generations. Mothers teach their daughters to say the rosary prayer and the First Communion is a family celebration. But without the secure bond of family in a stable environment, Catholicism is complex to thrive and faces discontinuation of legacy with no parents to teach it to their children. Consequently, the disintegration of black families is the sine qua non of the decline of black Catholics in the U.S. to this date. Even if the American Jesuits, including the present Georgetown administration, have expressed their regret and condolence to the 272 black people they sold for profits, the American Catholic Church should continuously endeavor to reconcile with the racialism within the Church by making all races of people welcome when they come to the Church by reaching out to the concerns of each that are universal to all of us.



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  • Old People (2022) – Film Essay

    Old People shows the issue of the generation gaps between the young and the old, not in the adolescent revolt against the adult institution, but in the societal and cultural context regarding the weakening familial bond between wife and husband, child and parent, and grandchildren and grandparent.

    Melika is a successful lawyer from a city heading with her children to her sister’s wedding at their childhood home in a village. Upon arrival, Melika finds her once beloved father, who loved her and her children so much, is sent to a nearby nursing home whose environment is no better than a mad asylum in atmosphere and appearance. Seeing her father spiritless and aimless alone in a dark room gives her a pang of leaving him behind for her ambitious future as a city lawyer, but she tries to suppress it by bringing him home just for the wedding day. But that is her self-induced wish to relieve herself of guilt, for her father is so broken with a shattered heart that his daughters deserted him, driven away from their home, their happy life that he still longs for. Such sadness is collected among all the old people in the nursing home, abandoned in dreadful isolation from the community that has put them into such an institutional grave and buried alive. The rest is a prelude to a symphony of carnage burning in the fury of the undead and neglected.

    Although this movie is presented as a horror movie, it really isn’t in terms of its thematic and contextual subject. It is a horror that we as a society have become Logan’s World, where ageism and lookism prevail over humanity and discriminate against those who do not fit in their touchstone of the ideal. And what is old, and how old is old? Are we not all advancing in age? Youth is wasted on the young, as Oscar Wilde cleverly concluded. Being old should not be a curse but a celebration of experience in life and, therefore, must be embraced with respect and dignity. Just because we become old doesn’t mean our feelings are dead, as the grandfather tells his beloved grandson: “Oh, yes! I love you so terribly much!”

  • ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell

    The personification of success equals the characterization of the person in our society that has established an unwritten pervasive eugenic rubric of material success in representing where you live. The stories of Rags to Riches are mainly to blame because they are modern-day mythology of heroes and heroines or fairytales to imbue the populace with slim hopes that can also be dangerous, like mass-marketplace placebo anti-depressants. From Hercules to Cinderella, those whose success from their humble origins we love is not self-made as they claim to be in their memoir or interviews but are made of chance and circumstances. This book reveals how these outliers are not outliers but are insiders of the leagues of winners in sociological terms and facts.

    The book opens with a remarkable bible passage from the Gospel according to Matthew, dubbed as the “Matthew Effect” thus: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him, that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” It means that success results from accumulated advantage and vice versa. The accumulated advantage is a combination of one’s ability and ambition interacting with the particular circumstances surrounding their rise over difficulties or challenges. Indeed, people who make lots of money must have burnt their midnight lamps to arrive where they are, but they also have people who help them and time to achieve their goals without worrying about other cares of the world. Hence, I don’t like JF Kennedy’s proclamation, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country. You can criticize people on welfare as losers lacking motivation and diligence when they need personal structural guidance and constructive public assistance to help them stand on their feet. You can’t just leave those behind the race as being slow or inadequate for the race.

    In ancient Greek mythology, the human race was born of mud by Prometheus and imbued with intelligence by Pallas Athena. Prometheus then gave sacred fire stolen from Olympus to make a better life. In the Old Testament, God blessed Abraham with wealth, who also helped his chosen few from those who instigated his wrath. Although modern-day outliers are not prophets or demigods, they certainly have their lucky stars. As Shakespeare agreed, “it’s the stars that govern our conditions.” Even if you disagree, you should not judge people who make less money than you, or no employment, or live in humble housing, thinking their situations result from their faults.

  • compartmentalized

    There’s no such thing
    as a classless society
    even if the patriots sing
    No blue blood aristocracy
    but those trembled in needs
    with no jobs, no money
    are a class of their own
    pushed and patronized
    by the joy luck classes
    chanting in Salem’s fervor,
    “Beggars are losers!”

  • Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond – book review

    Jared Diamond’s Upheaval analyzes why a nation is how it is now. Of course, culture plays a role in changing the ethos of each new zeitgeist. Still, it is not so much a differentiating element as a distinguishing factor to characterize a national character. Instead, it is a mindset of individuals, including the governing elites in the nation, that determine the success and stagnation of the nation’s progress.

    Of all nations’ approaches to and results of political and sociological revolutions, the most successful example is Japan’s Meiji Restoration in the 19th century and democratization in the aftermath of WWII, both of which are one-of-a-kind upheavals yielding to outstanding progress. Japan’s confrontation with the West might have blown their isolated cultural prestige. However, rather than coiling in fear of the changes, Japan sprang back with new attitudes adapted from Europe’s and the U.S.’s technological development and cultural legacy to survive the new zeitgeist as the time’s juggernaut.

    On the other hand, the United States today needs change because it is highly polarized by political affiliations, ideological inclinations, and racial stratifications. The U.S. seems to have lurched in the above marsh when it should focus on the constructive, substantial, and realistic aspects of political agenda and social movements. For example, Americans tend more to ideas than facts that collectively affect individual needs, such as universal healthcare, a better educational system, employment opportunities, housing assistance, welfare programs, and workers’ rights. It s because American politicians aim to mobilize an army of people, aka constituents, to win their ideological war for occupying more congressional seats. In fact, American exceptionalism, that America is the best of all other countries in the world, averts the eyes from the lessons from other countries simply because they are beneath.

    Diamond is a polymath well versed in science, literature, philosophy, geography, psychology, and sociology. He talks about his family, students, and friends from other countries. He is no stranger to their cultures with the knowledge of the languages and cultural cues, which entitles him to an appellation of “a citizen of the world.” This book reads persuasive and perspicacious, among other books on similar subjects. Maybe I am biased, but if the man whose assessment of nations strikes my chord, then I can’t help it.