“We ought to do something about North Korea,” says Jo Schmo Politician, shaking his head, and the audience murmurs in agreement. A boat of food is shipped overseas, and a defector is shipped to the States. The salve has been applied to the itch, and North Korea fades, once again, from the public consciousness.
American citizens enjoy the bourgeois comfort and the bourgeois right to condemn the man who lets his dog poop on his neighbor’s lawn. If one gorilla is killed “unjustly,” Americans stage protests, point fingers every which way, and yell with the hopes of creating a freer and more just society. Meanwhile, North Korean labor-camp guards are forcing inmates to climb fences so they can use them as shooting practice, and nobody cares. The regime that has kidnapped over 180,000 foreigners since WWII and systematically starves the majority of its citizens is not even near the forefront of the American SJW consciousness. Is it because we think it best to tackle the little things first – first raise awareness about gorilla rights and then start to think about human trafficking? I think it more likely that people just are not properly informed. It takes effort, or a lucky web stumble, to get to know the extent of the atrocities committed by the DMRK.
When the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is not being lampooned, it is being taken for granted. On television, one hears Trump call Kim Jong-Un “rocket man,” and laughs a bit because frankly, the two both cut pretty comic figures with their chubby hands and iconic hairdos. However, behind all the laughing and crying and news babble about the DPRK’s nuclear threat and diplomatic tensions, Korean mothers faint as their babies are born and immediately killed, political leaders sip cognac in their limousines as they traverse the empty roads of Pyongyang, and out in a field a skeletal 7-year-old is closing his eyes as he chews yellow grass to remember the taste of the egg he ate exactly one year ago. With all the rigid secrecy of the Hermit Nation (as North Korea is sometimes called) many powerful stories remain to be told. Statistics by the Human Rights Watch, despite their credibility, don’t make it real. And so, all the public sees is the Rocket Man shaking a fist at America like he and his kind always have, little knowing what evils occur beyond the screen.
But right here, I want to warn Americans to keep their eyes and ears open, and to close their mouths once in a while and think. Abortion is a practice that has officially killed at least 44,498,750 American children since 1970. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 killed a million ethnic Hutus, and Sudan continues to kill and oppress its own people today. I didn’t know about these things – not in enough detail, not with enough immediacy – from the mainstream media. I agree that it is human nature to be essentially selfish and tribalistic, but given all the high rhetoric about freedom and human rights, and the ideals modern, enlightened Americans wear as a golden badge of moral superiority, I think we are well equipped to fight this tendency of human nature and take responsibility for what is sin, fighting to overcome our willful ignorance, snobbery, and selfishness. The modern age condemns past ages as barbaric and congratulates itself for having transcended old travesties so that it might focus on more subtle wrongs. This deliberate blindness perpetuates ignorance of the plethora of evils abroad, and the ignorance of evils abroad (and in our own hearts) perpetuates this deliberate blindness, with the result that Harambe’s death becomes the worst of modern injustices. Kids can be forgiven this starry-eyed elitism; adults cannot.
Behind abstract talk of diplomacy and economic statistics lies a library of unheard stories, not about North Korea but about North Koreans. If Americans can gather the courage to listen to these stories, then they cannot choose but to adopt the men and women of North Korea as our brothers and sisters into the family of humankind as they feel their pain. The echoes of the Declaration of Independence – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” – will haunt us until we take action towards their defense.
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It is reading stories about the human rights abuses in North Korea that got me angry enough to type up a blog post. Even so, with this kind of thing, the next moment I yell at my brother for asking me to wake him up for school, and the next month, I have utterly forgotten I ever wanted to single-handedly bring down the North Korean government. Somehow the fact that children are starving and being sold into slavery, tortured, and forced to stone defectors while the government sails about on yachts and imports hundreds of Rolex watches fails to change the way I live my life. I regret this terrifying hypocrisy and lack of character, and I mean to do something about it (adopts politician’s pose of shaking head; this cues you to think “yeah” along with me and feel good about reading this and being righteously angry.)
But I actually did do something about it. You might call this just putting salve on the itch, but I donated a few thousand to Liberty in North Korea. And I want to do more. I really do. I want to stop this horrible crime against humanity. I want to not be a hypocrite. And I’m sure you do too. It is unlikely we have the power, money, and influence to fix this problem that has festered for so many years, but God has the power to do anything. So please join me in praying to God for North Korea and its suffering people.
Psalm 10:17-18
O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted;
you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear
18 to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed,
so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.
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