I read Yeonmi Park’s 2015 book In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom the first week of this month. It was the riveting, excruciating account of her life in North Korea and the harrowing story of her escape to China, South Korea, and America. Two weeks later I finished her 2/14/23 book While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America, which contrasts the tyranny and oppression she experienced in North Korea to her concerning observations of things she’s experienced here in “the land of the free” where censoring and “group think” may foreshadow sliding down a slippery slope toward erosion of American freedoms she holds so dear. In his forward Jordan B. Peterson states Park seeks “to warn us here in our luxury and comfort not to fall prey to the same ideological temptations that doomed the Soviet Union and all its satellites and that still possess the billion-plus people in China, much to the detriment of that country’s beleaguered citizens and the rest of the world.”
America seems to have been on a steady schedule of a lot of negative self talk over the past quarter century. The kind of “trash talking” fighters use to break the confidence and concentration of their opponent, is reaching a classroom crescendo of criticism and cancelling here. The net effect is a rising generation of secondary and post secondary graduates who have a mindset skewed away from American exceptionalism on the world stage and the enduring legacy of American history that instructs the future by virtue of its critical analysis. A nation will always have its external critics, many of whom govern the countries our refugees are fleeing. Park notes, “That’s why the subversion of critical thinking is so dangerous. It is the mechanism by which humans lose their faculties as individuals and succumb to groupthink, which is a precondition for every totalitarian society on Earth, and which ultimately felled my father.”
In his forward to Park’s book Jordan B. Peterson states, “North Korea’s military is the fourth largest in the world and is nuclear armed. Furthermore, as Ms. Park points out, the anti-American rhetoric employed by the Kim family’s nest of devils is ultimately inflammatory, in the most atomic of manners: North Korean schoolchildren are taught that the total destruction of American cities by the very weapons just described is something not only fully justified but to be devoutly desired. YouTube’s response? The demonetization of Yeonmi’s channel—not once, but repeatedly, with no explanation.”
Park demonstrates how precious civil liberties are to those who grew up without them. The Mariel boatlift of the 1980s showed Cubans were willing to risk their lives and their children’s lives to escape socialism and live in freedom. Freedom burns the hottest in the hearts of those who lived in tyranny. Park reminds us, “What is this freedom that we need to preserve? Dear reader, it’s right there in the Bill of Rights: freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition; the right to bear arms; freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; the right to due process of law, freedom from self-incrimination, and the rights of accused persons; freedom from cruel and unusual punishments; the freedom of cities and states to make laws for themselves independently of the federal government.” By virtue of her book’s title, While Time Remains, she hopes we heed her warning of forces among us seeking to erode our freedoms.
The stories that mean the most to me are, like Yeonmi Park’s, those of people and families who lived under the most challenging brutal circumstances, yet still had a dream of a better life in their hearts so strong they were willing to risk and do everything to bring that dream to life. Their courage and sacrifice reminds us that what we offer is precious and must be safeguarded. Lady Liberty’s “Colossus” poem describes, “Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles…Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" We are the world’s portal, a nation of people willing to die for freedom and liberty. It is up to us all to keep the fires of freedom burning bright, protected from the forces of tyranny among us and in the world. Those who yearn to breathe free, those who most recently passed through our golden door, those who defend our nation, and those who value freedom above all else, comprise our fiercest army.
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