The Madness that is North Korea

     The other night I got home from life and my roommate Ben was watching a National Geographic episode on Netflix.  It was about North Korea.  I started watching it about a quarter of the way through the episode and grew increasingly shocked.

     Apparently North Korea is more crazy than I thought.  I thought that they were just a crazy nation that got a kick out of resisting Western imperialism, but were probably changing with the times.  Like China.  China is communist and suppresses free speech and trade, but as time goes on they seem to be opening up.  Foreigners are allowed to go to China and most of our things are manufactured there.  I would hate to be Chinese, but it would be tolerable I suppose.

North Korea is a crazy nation that gets a kick out of resisting Western imperialism.  That is most evident at the only access point along the border with South Korea.  The North Koreans have three guards dressed up in their uniforms guarding the border; two of them face each other so that one of them can shoot the other one if he decides to defect to South Korea, and the third one faces north to shoot any other North Koreans that might want to cross the border.  On the other side, a mere hundred yards away or so, a South Korean soldier stands beside an American soldier.

However North Korea is much more crazy than that.  On the show, a team of doctors went to North Korea to perform cataract surgery on the blind people.  Apparently basic medical care and nutrition is nearly nonexistent in North Korea.  The doctors performed cataract surgery on about 1000 patients some of whom couldn't see for years.  When the patients got their bandages removed, the first thing that they did was to walk over to a picture of Kim Jong-il, their leader, and his father and bow down and start worshiping him.  I seriously thought it was a church service.  When people were interviewed the first thing they would talk about was how great their Dear Leader is.  Apparently if people say anything negative about the government, they are taken to prison camps.  Very few people return from these camps.

We have some very real problems here in the United States.  The Patriot Act, the wars in the Middle East, corrupt politicians, etc.  However, I am thankful for the freedoms that we do have.  It could be a lot worse.  Like North Korea.