Tao of K-drama: The Rough Rock Project

In Season 3 of Dr. Romantic, teacher/philosopher Dr. Kim Sabu, speaking as images of disaster scroll past, says: 

Abnormal climate, natural disasters, the climate is rapidly changing for the worse, forest fires, earthquakes, and wars. Many unexpected incidents, accidents, and man-made disasters. We will be engulfed in these suddenly and without warning. At this point the world has become a place where, no matter what happens, we wouldn't find it surprising. Now, we have to prepare for that kind of world. Our Rough Rock Project will become the cornerstone for that. 

During the season, various people pause to look at notebooks labeled "Rough Rock Project," but it is a loose thread that is never tied up -- maybe something that will be taken up in Season 4, should we be so lucky. I found the proposition irresistible -- that our work is to prepare for a world in which nothing, however outlandish and horrifying, would surprise us. 

Whether we are surprised or not, we will have to name the things that are happening. Listening with friends and family to Donald Trump's inaugural address today, we heard a long series of policies he plans to implement that run counter to the kinds of acts that would prepare us to meet the unexpected. Perhaps chief among them was his pledge to "Drill, baby, drill." 

As one colleague remarked, that is running towards Death -- Sigmund Freud noted that EROS and THANATOS form a major dialectic in human life. This offers a useful frame for the emphasis on LOVE offered by the clergy gathered with Bishop William Barber to respond to the inaugural address. 

Teacher/philosopher Dr, Kim represents passionate and uncompromising love for his patients, colleagues, hospital and community. He is completely committed to the fight against death -- he is ready to operate on a woman with dementia, and cries when she says she just wants to sleep. He demands this level of commitment from his team, as well. Older surgeons from Seoul are terrified by what they see as his recklessness. Their practice is to avoid malpractice charges by walking away when patients have little chance of survival. 

Dr. Kim doesn't see it that way: he wants to take the risk, because the patient might live, and he is dedicated to that. This commitment is what brings him to the new Rough Rock Project, as the path to survival will be made complicated by the unexpected. Just as the trauma center, founded on sound study of surgical and emergency procedure, is the outcome of the Cornered Stone Project, some new way of organizing and thinking will be the outcome of the new project. I am with Alathe, the Dramabeans recapper, who wrote:

But highs and lows aside, I still get shivers down my spine when our doctors race to the OR in determined slowmo! And so, against all better judgement, I’m invoking the jinx. It sure is quiet here without a Season 4, huh? (Somewhere, perhaps, a distant studio executive’s phone rings…)

I do hope there's a Season 4, which lays out the Rough Rock Project.

But I don't think that lets me or any of us off the hook -- Dr. Kim is talking about the world in which we live -- all of us. And therefore, the Rough Rock Project has plenty of room for us to join. How is Rough Rock different from Cornered Stone? What tools are the tools for worldwide levels of destruction and upheaval beyond any we've ever seen? These are open questions, left for all of us to take to heart and to our offices so we can do the work -- the work of being on the side of LOVE and LIFE for all.