If you are of Korean descent, then you may have a greater appreciation of the 4th of July, but then again you may not.  What’s amazing today is that Korea is the only country in the world that is divided by a military zone and is technically still at war with each other: North vs. South.  Events from the past few weeks have been a stark reminder of this divide, and not just between the Koreas but between North Korea and the world.  Euna Lee and Laura Ling’s capture and trial in North Korea, Mike Kim’s recent press tour of his book about North Korea, and the recent missle and nuclear tests near Pyongyang has reminded the world that the cold war may be being revived in Asia.  The irony is that Iraq was supposed to have weapons of mass destruction and the U.S. invaded, and found nothing.  Then you have Kim Jong-Il who keeps telling the world that he has WMDs and will continue to test and will threaten to use them.  Yet the difficulty is that North Korea sits central to Japan, South Korea and China, which is like a scene out of a movie with the detonator and dynamite attached to the one lunatic sitting in the middle of the hostages.  The recent craziness of Kim Jong-Il makes you wonder, what if your parents or grandparents had been born on the wrong side of the DMZ or had not migrated fast enough south from Pyongyang.  Mike Kim tells the story of how the Kim Jong-Il propaganda is propagated: kids are taught math by the question of, how many total Americans are killed if you kill two and three American soldiers?  That’s crazy but had our grandparents been left behind, we would be learning this type of propaganda math.

The 4th of July is America’s commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and its freedom from Great Britain.  Unfortunately, freedom is a result of wars and bloodshed (remember the Revolutionary War from history class).  No one knows how the North Korean story is going to end, but everyone’s hope is that it’ll end peacefully, the North Koreans will be freed from their tyranny, and the nuclear threat will end.  But until then, for all the Koreans and Korean-Americans out there, be thankful for the freedoms that we do have because our parents and grandparents were on the right side of the DMZ and also for the opportunity that America brings to everyone one of us.  Let freedom ring!!!

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