North Korean Freedom Day

Between all of the activities of this day, a full-time job, a family, and closing on a house, it’s been a very busy week. Yes, I was there. There were certainly hundreds of people there, maybe a thousand. I will plead exhaustion for now and just convey a few brief impressions:

1. In spite of 9/11, it’s still astonishingly easy to walk into a Senate office building and personally deliver your views to the most powerful people on earth.

2. Remember the name Adrian Hong. Adrian is just 20, and just a few weeks ago, he started building an organization called LiNK, Liberation in North Korea. Now he has chapters all over the country and brought several hundred students to the demonstration. It astonishes you that such a modest, approachable person can build such an organization that quickly. Thanks to Adrian, the faces in the crowd were overwhelmingly young.

3. No matter how hard I try, it’s just not physically possible for me to chant a slogan or wear one on a T-shirt, any more than I could, say, do backflips. Yet my cynical side leaves just enough room for me to admire those who can do those things for good reasons, and who had the conviction to be there.

4. I met a number of North Korean defectors, and simply put, they’re hard to understand. They have a frightened aloofness beaten into them by growing up in a fearful world. They make speak a language similar to South Korean, but their personalities are no more South Korean than Japanese, or Congolese. They are their own species of human being. The psychological barriers around them are like force fields. Not until this moment did it occur to me what struck me most about them–only once did I see even one of them smile, and this was clearly forced, though with the best of intentions. This was from the oldest of them, and like the rings of a tree, one can see that the younger North Koreans are physically smaller and more deeply hurt than their elders. Granted, it wasn’t a night at the operetta, but I have never seen people so deprived of the capacity for joy. I also sensed that the women among them possessed the preponderance of the strength. Soon Ok-Lee stands out among them all, notwithstanding Kang Chol-Hwan’s great accomplishments as a writer and journalist. Mrs. Lee is a small, frail woman, visibly scarred by her years in the camps, and yet she speaks with the quiet, dignified power of deep convictions.

5. There are still good people in South Korea. It was very encouraging to see that people like the NKNet members have precisely the same values as we do. Still, I sense more peril for their own country than they do. They remain optimistic that they can change public opinion at home. I wish I could agree. I have about given up on South Korea.

Now, our suspense is to see if we did any good. The North Korean Freedom Act is scheduled for a vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Asia Subcommittee. Every letter could help make the difference.