And yes, I know Korean democratization is ~insufficiently revolutionary~ and the neoliberal violence continues unabated. I know the reality we live in, and don't have to be reminded that we're not in some Promised Land of decolonial perfection.
But by God I'm not going to apologize for being relieved that arbitrary detention and torture are less likely than in the 1980s, and that my autistic son is unlikely to be beaten in school by teachers or picked up by the police and put in a labor camp as a "vagrant." Yes I still live in a shitty client state of the U.S. and an ableist capitalist hellscape, but there are differences of degree even in hell and these changes are more than cosmetic.