January 8, 2007
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I know I've written about this before but doggone it....!
North Korea has been brought to my attention yet again, this time via an online article at Canada's National Post: The weirdest country on earth
In a graphic travelogue, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, Guy
Delisle, a Quebec artist who now works in Paris, has given us a deadpan
account of how a hideous tyranny looks to foreigners. He went there to
work for two months on a French children's animation co-produced with
North Korea. Like many visitors, he felt as if he had landed on another
planet.He has the peculiar innocence typical of graphic artists.
He was pleased when the driver meeting him at the airport handed him
flowers but soon learned they were to be left at Kim Il-sung's tomb,
the first tourist site he was required to visit. He and other lonely
foreigners spent melancholy evenings discussing what there was to do
after you had toured the Museum of Imperialist Occupation. Delisle was
reduced to making paper airplanes and flying them from the 15th floor
of the nearly empty 50-storey hotel built for visitors. He met no
Koreans except Comrade Guide and Comrade Translator, both of whom were
with him whenever he went out but were terrified into silence. He
noticed the absence of disabled people on the streets, which his guide
explained by saying no North Koreans are disabled; they are all born
healthy, strong and intelligent. The same guide also explained that all
the people cleaning the streets were volunteers.[grimly] Of course what's frightening to contemplate is what happens to those who are not born "healthy, strong and intelligent." Nothing good, that's for sure.
When was the last time we all prayed for North Korea?
Well, that's too long. Those poor people.
Comments (4)
ARGH!!! It happened AGAIN!
Suddenly Margaret's comment's missing.
That does it. I'm going to see if this comment-snatching gremlin is afflicting other Xangas or just mine. >:^<
That is scary. Even scarier is a discussion led by a professor at University of Central Florida. They discussed the decreased value of the physically and mentally disabled. I was floored. In this bastion of liberalism and political correctness one could never discuss God but we could say that other human beings were of less value because of disability. Well maybe this gives us an insight into where we might end up if the Godless forces of liberalism take control of our own nation. Irreligion and death to those who cannot produce for the master....Government.
There's no denying the disabled, ill, and most anyone unable to care for themselves and produce income invariably fare badly under godless regimes.
Which, of course, should come as no surprise.
This probably isn't what he meant, but there is a sense in which the "value to society" (if I can be forgiven for coming off so crassly) of disabled people has decreased.
Compared to the age when there was much more manual unskilled labor, domestic servitude, etc., there is less that severely disabled people can do, and more need for them simply to be cared for and supported by others.
I actually knew a missionary family who decided against adopting a Ugandan orphan because they knew that should they ever decide to settle permanently in the U.S. again (which they did just a few years later) she would actually have fewer options in life than by remaining in the lower-tech society of Uganda. In Uganda, she could be placed with a decently prosperous family and do some sort of simple domestic service. She wasn't severely disabled, but she was at the level where she really couldn't expect to be self-supporting in adulthood in this society. She would have had to be completely dependent, and would likely have been in less pleasant circumstances upon outliving her adoptive parents in the U.S., than she would be in service to a good family in Uganda.
Now mind you, I'm not saying that such people are less "valuable," but they are less valued, in ways that go behind whether we think nice or mean thoughts about them. Our society has left them behind.
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