Quote:
Originally Posted by apocalipstic
I have been arguing with it every time I see it.
Again people wanting us to be like North Korea????
Someone said that if at 911 people had been asked for "papers" it would not have happened. Those people were from Saudi Arabia, and had FAKE papers.
*bangs head against wall*
Why do people especially queer people want the USA to be anything like NORTH KOREA?????? Afghanistan? Seriously?
Seriously? I do not get it.
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Honestly I think it's a lot of folks who take living in America for granted. They don't realize just how amazingly good they have it here. One irony of this, for me, is that when war next breaks out on the Korean peninsula and we are fighting there (we have a treaty obligation to be there, we *can't* leave) they will paint North Korea as a nation no one should want to emulate (which it isn't). If confronted by their statement expressing admiration for the border security that North Korea has, they will then deny that they would EVER say such a thing!
What's more, the person who wrote this and every single person who sends this meme forward like it was a good thing is not even wrong about the Afghanistan border. They demonstrate their near complete ignorance of the Afghan border--when you have a moment, take a look at a good topological map of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The most powerful, technologically advanced, and nightmarishly lethal war machine ever devised by the mind of man can't secure it. Think about that for just a moment. Our Air Force can pick any section of the sky, anywhere on this planet and say "we want complete and total control of that area in a week" and within a week we will have *absolute* air superiority over it. There is no body of water larger than a lake that the Navy cannot control pretty much at will. We have satellites that are *extremely* sensitive and yet, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is owned by no one--not the Pakistani army, not the American army, not the tribes living in the area. It's a free-for-all there.
I bring that up not to puff out my chest at the power of the American military but to illustrate a point: yes, if you cross the border into Afghanistan you very well might be shot. There are any of a number of ways to die crossing that border but it doesn't matter if you tried to ninja your way across that border or drove across in a convoy, your risks are about the same because it is lawless at that border. There's a real honest-to-goodness shooting war going on that and anyone who crosses into a war zone is taking their lives in their hands! The fact that people would use, on the one hand, the last Stalinist dictatorship on the planet (and Kim Jong-Il is a Stalinist more than a Maoist) and on the other an active war zone as examples of perfect border security shows that they haven't thought very much about what it is like to actually LIVE in those nations nor what it means to be a citizen of a liberal democracy like America.
At the risk of a Godwin's law violation, Hitler made the trains run on time. Could we have perfect border security? Almost certainly yes. We would also no longer resemble America and would more closely resemble either pre-1991 Russia or pre-Unification East Germany. Could we have near perfect internal security? Almost certainly. At that point we would BE pre-Unification East Germany or pre-1991 Russia.
Those folks who think that North Korea has such great border security forget that not praising the Dear Leader on queue or with insufficient enthusiasm or slightly out of time with everyone else will *also* land one in prison. They seem to want to trade their freedom (which they take utterly for granted) for security (even though the actual threat to them, personally, is relatively small) and, as such, they deserve neither.
Something I would like to see us American liberals do is revive a sense of what it means to BE an American. What our ideals are, why we hold them, and what the alternatives are. Yes, our history is spotty in a lot of areas and downright tragically horrific in others. And yes, all of the men who laid down the foundation of modern Western liberal democracy were white, many of them were slaveholders, most of them were sexists, and quite a number of them were xenophobic racists and cultural imperialists at that. I admit all of that. And yet, and yet...if you read the ideas, many of them are very good, sound ideas. I think that some of us who call ourselves liberal (as I do) or progressive (as others might) have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. In our rush to point out their failings, we have decided that the *ideas* expressed aren't worth teaching and therefore, aren't worth carrying forward. Where we stand now, where on the one hand, people post things admiring the North Koreans for their brutal and Orwellian police state while on the other hand shouting USA! USA! and calling it patriotism, is in part a reflection of the fact that we do not know what it means to be a citizen of a liberal democracy.
I am trying to re-learn what it means because I am a grandparent now. It will be my job, as matriarch of my family, to pass on what it means to be a decent citizen to my grandchildren. One thing I know I will pass on is that being an American citizen is far more deep, far more worthwhile, and altogether more demanding than chanting USA! USA! and asserting, against quite a large amount of empirical evidence, that America is the greatest and best at everything.