Life could be much worse

Take a moment's break from stressing about holiday finances, bickering over the fiscal cliff, even climate change dangers. At least as Americans we know about such things, and by activism can do something about them.

Not so in North Korea, whose government officials promote military prowess while its people struggle to survive.

This week's news brought a report that North Korea has successfully launched a long-range rocket into orbit. The White House described it as a "highly provocative act" that threatens regional security. On equal footing to the rocket's obvious danger to neighboring South Korea, China, Japan and beyond is the ongoing effect such costly military endeavors have on the North Koreans themselves.

North Korea is the world's most closed society and, seemingly, the regime that cares the least about its own citizens. Since 1948, a succession of autocrats from the Kim family have ruled with an iron hand. Patriarch Kim Il Sung is credited with developing the "cult of personality" that calls for all North Koreans to hold their leader in thrall; when this "dear leader" died in 1994, he ascended not so much to heaven as to become "eternal president of the republic." In succession his son, Kim Jong Il, and more recently his grandson, Kim Jong Un, have tightly gripped the reins of power. Decades of military intelligence, stories from surviving defectors and information gleaned from satellites all point to a nation that cows government officials and ordinary citizens alike through a system based on fear. Anyone who questions the regime risks severe punishment, including being sent to one of the country's many prison camps, or even put to death.

Other nations fear that North Korea's Unha-3 rocket is a cover for testing technology for missiles that could be used to strike as far as the United States. There have been previous attempts, all failed. Just as dangerous is the general instability such a regime creates among its neighbors and its citizenry. Lacking not just material goods, but enough food and natural resources, North Koreans grub out an existence devoid of many creature comforts and also devoid of basic information about the outside world. The situation was so dire in the 1990s that starving North Koreans braved potentially fatal encounters with border guards while fleeing into rural China just to find food.

In the United States attitudes differ about how to manage North Korea, with the incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ed Royce, calling U.S. policy toward the Kim government a "long-term failure" that allows the North Korean threat to grow.

It's hard to know how to address this insular nation whose sole purpose is to prove its military might, which pours all of its meager resources into a show of arms. Many of our own domestic woes and international squabbles seem paltry indeed compared to the 24 million unfortunate North Koreans, whose "leaders" inflict on them a lifetime of the most calculated spiritual and corporal abuse.

Enjoy your freedom. It's worth every tedious policy argument.

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