Wednesday 30 March 2016

Famine Version 2.0

Two days ago in North Korea.....a bit of warning came out via the state-run news folks that North Koreans should prepare themselves for a possible famine and a downward economic spiral.  On the positive side, the same article noted for the benefit of North Korean folk.....“the road to revolution is long and arduous."

You can imagine Hu (the local streetsweeper) and his wife standing there....both near forty years old. Both having gone to bed hungry for most of the forty years of their life.  Hu weighs maybe 140 pounds, and his wife is a lean 88 pounds.  There might be one or two days out of the year when some extra portion of food was dealt out in celebration of some national holiday, and they can remember some day in 2003 when they got real ice cream one afternoon.

For all these years, Hu and the wife both thought they were presently in a famine and in a downward economic spiral.  Now?  He'd be shaking his head and realizing that this was the good times, and as good as things could get.

Now, not that I encourage this sort of behavior.....but IF I were South Korea.....I'd make up this postcard (waterproof).  It'd be a picture of a Kai sports vehicle (fully decked out), with a pallet of beef and a pallet of beer on one side of the vehicle, and a pallet each of rice and fresh fruit on the other side, and a caption...."Free for each North Korean citizen upon the downfall of Kim and reunification".  Then drop the postcards via some launch device or balloon.....into North Korea.  Fifty thousand North Koreans would start some kinda of coup attempt by tomorrow morning.

The thing is....if you were thinking the situation was pretty bad and simply accepted this as normal.....for decades, and now some idiot came up to suggest worse times ahead and some fake talk of a hike on the road to revolution....you'd be asking stupid questions....well, if you were anyone but a North Korean.  Apparently, they've reached a point where they just suck it up, and just keep walking.

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