Eight things Yeonmi Park can teach us about freedom, socialism, and mental resiliency.

This 26 year-old woman has blown my mind, and I deeply hope you will trust my recommendation to set aside 90-minutes, and do nothing but watch and listen to this incredible interview. The defector, Yeonmi Park, had all of her remaining family in North Korea "vanished," because she was so brave to voice her story. That is an obscenely high price to pay, to speak truth to power.

Do you know anyone who has ever made such a literal sacrifice solely in the interest of exposing oppression? Me either. So please, make time.

• If you are Black, you may feel surprised to witness blatant slavery, in operation right now, that is not based on skin color. (Their 25 million citizens are ethnically homogenous.) You will see/hear stories of injustice and inhumane brutalizing that we are historically familiar with, but it's based purely on class, rather than origin/physical traits. It's a trip. My heart makes room for North Korea.
  
  
•  If you are a rape survivor, you will be strengthened by Yeonmi's story, because she  survived being bought and repeatedly raped as a "mistress"... at thirteen.
  
  
• If you are in favor of "the socialist paradise," your ideology will be challenged by how it looks actually lived out.
  
  
• If you are disturbed by the troubling scope-creep of governments all over the world, who are adopting attitudes and policies frighteningly similar to Kim Jong Un, you will be inspired and possibly motivated to become more daring in protecting your human rights.
  
  
• If you are naive and think the world operates in simple tones of black and white, you will be expanded by the complexity of human nature. As an example, the married man who bought Yeonmi at 13 as a sex slave, later freed her and made her safe escape possible. Bad people are capable of good deeds. Good people are capable of bad deeds. Dualistic thinking is too shallow and simplistic to appreciate that.
  
  
• If you are a consumer of American mainstream media, your intake may be similar to the propaganda stream in North Korea, as there is also no freedom of press there. (They have no internet or outside books, and one television channel which only espouses the greatness of its leader and regime).
  
  
• If you were brainwashed or indoctrinated into any belief system that made you inferior and placed an outer entity as your superior, you will marvel at how far a decolonized mind can carry you, as it has carried Yeonmi... who now resides in the States with a husband and son.
  
  
• If you are poor, or even very poor, but have the ability to see this post, you have more than Yeonmi had growing up, (eating grasshoppers as only protein source, and bathing in a river in warm months, and not at all in the winter).

One of the most remarkable minutes in this interview happens at 43:30-44:30. There, Yeonmi admits that she first found freedom frightening. "It's not easy!" she says, and confesses that if she could have ensured having enough food, she would have preferred returning to a pre-determined future, with all decisions already made for her. She would have traded her freedom, for frozen potatoes. ​That is how dangerous attachment to "security" can be.

In the name of "public health," human behavior and movement has been restricted in ways that now more resemble North Korea, than former North America. I say "former North America" because CV-19 has drawn a clear line in the sand of history and human consciousness. Before Corona, North America enjoyed (and maybe even took for granted) basic human rights like breathing, earning a living, and being with each other. After Corona, all those things and more are under severe restrictions.

Looming threats of medical mandates are all over the place, while there are zero measures of medical accountability?! 

Is it acceptable for a government to suspend human liberty, force poison into human bodies, all while they are exempt from legal consequence of humans' reaction to that poison? How do we lack so much self-respect as to not INSIST on demonstrated rigor and ethics PRIOR TO the dispatching of any DNA-disturbing substance?

Large-scale flu vaccines started in 1945. Seventy-five years later, and the flu still persists. How can that cycle be considered successful, and worthy of repeating?

And as we have NOT yet succeeded in containing/mitigating the flu in all these decades, how is it reasonable or sane to believe we will now SAFELY contain/mitigate CV-19 in a fraction of the time? Why have natural solutions been repressed and discouraged? Why has the function of our innate defense/immune system been so under-discussed? Whyyyyyy is any trust being placed in a rushed, economically-motivated, tracking-enabled neuro-toxin?

The world has been turned upside down. Our lives have been put on artificial pause, while 'support' from the government has quieted too many mouths. Are we  becoming more passive and voyeuristic... hoping for the safety of frozen potatoes?

The darkest place on the planet is called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Clearly, its ideology is not in support of common people. It preys upon common people, exploits them as slaves, and literally keeps them too malnourished to even have the strength to protest or resist.

Hopefully, by seeing North Korea from the outside, we will do all that is necessary to not become any version of them on our inside.