You know your idea of adoptees descending on the National Assembly may hold some potential. I wonder what they will do if some 25,000 adoptees all show up at once on the steps of the National Assembly with foreign medias? Can this be somehow organized?

No. Because most of the Korean Adoptee Diaspora is in shell shock and putting all their energy into daily coping in countries they still feel alien in or spitting out their parents adoptive rhetoric. Plus, it costs money to come to Korea. For many it only happens once or twice in a lifetime, and then it’s only a superficial homeland tour.

This idea has been bandied about before – with great, great, passion. But most adoptees are, naturally and understandably, NOT activists. Because reacting or being an upstart disrupts a long hard-fought peaceful (socially) existence. And adoptees also fear rejection to a greater degree than the general population and are less likely to position themselves where they can risk that in their families and communities.

You know, that is one of the exquisitely sick things about international adoption: it disperses and isolates. And for those populations like Minnesota or Sweden, they have a higher measure of community monitoring and rejection to deal with, so speaking up there means both higher external and internal censorship.

It also takes organization and money, and the major organizations with the largest adoptee base (because they can afford staff and services) has adoption industry money supporting them AND being on their board of directors. So they can’t bite the hand that feeds them and can’t be turned to for mobilization.

Non-profit organizations, in my opinion, are just like big business, only their books are cooked in such a way that nothing is called a “profit” but given a new name or allocated to a project which magically eats money. Charity is so often merely a front for preserving selfishness. And charity is great because you don’t have to pay taxes. But charities still manage to play dirty politics, and the money which might be called profit in a for-profit instead gets funneled into dirty politics.

The adoption industry calls itself a charity but runs like a shady business. A really smart shady business: that divides and conquers, infiltrates the opposition, adjusts swiftly to criticisms, has lawyers to make sure they use the most ambiguous language, and diversifies its operations. They are geniuses really, these international adoption agencies.

Here’s a a workshop offered by Holt from a seminar schedule for the adoption industry from 2008

http://www.jcics.org/AC2008_Schedule.htm#5A:%20Is%20Adoption%20PC

5A: Is Adoption PC? Anti-Intercountry Adoption Trends in the Media, Cyberspace and the Adoption Community
Susan Cox, Holt International Children’s Services, Inc., and Kathy Sacco, Family and Children’s Agency
Friday, April 11, 2008 (11:15 am – 12:30 pm)

Historically, adoption has been portrayed as a way of protecting and saving children from inadequate environments. Recently, there has been unprecedented criticism of intercountry adoption as an ethical practice. These criticisms have manifested themselves in the form of anti-adoption groups, websites, blogs, scholarly critiques and media representations. This presentation will provide an overview of anti-intercountry adoption trends and explore their substance and methods of dissemination. The presentation will include the emergence of the adult adoptee community and their impact on intercountry adoption. Finally, it will offer participants recommendations for responding to these message in the areas of public relations, policy and practice.

Clearly, they are afraid of the children they’ve shipped all over the world.

They watch everything we do. They even had an intranet website called “Rapid Information Process” devoted to tracking the opposition which stopped being active in 2009. (probably due to better technology)

So we are stuck awake while others sleep. What will it take to wake adoptees up? How do we reach them all over the globe? And how do we convince them that what happens in Korea has something to do with what happened to them? And that it can change for the better? It’s like broadcasting a television public service announcement to luddites. They won’t hear it because they’re not plugged in, and even if they were plugged in, the adoption industry and the power industry are best buddies.