More themes to expect from this blog on North Korea... Leadership, control, and how you are led and controlled You can't miss some of the North Korean government's more blatant methods to control its population -- the propaganda, unique versions of history, controlling the flow of people and information across its borders, and regulating trade, for example. Some you can't see as a tourist but the press outside North Korea reports it, like the how they punish citizens and stratify society. Some you can only speculate on, like how leaders behave in person and communicate to their staff and the rest of the population. When you see their obvious methods to influence the public methods here become suddenly obvious. We have more advertising than they…

More themes to expect from this blog on North Korea... Seeing their lack of freedom leads you to value yours more -- and that you have to maintain it Compare your freedom to a North Korean's. Does your greater freedom bring you reward and happiness? If you consider freedom essential to happiness and you aren't much happier than most North Koreans what are you doing wrong? What are you misunderstanding? The Occupy Wall Street movement is rising as I write this. People are outraged at, among other things, the lack of accountability in people who contributed to a global financial meltdown, many knowingly, many enriching themselves at others' expenses, likely illegally, certainly violating the golden rule of "do to others as you would have them…

Only having written a few posts, I've already hit some of the major themes that visiting North Korea raised in me. I'll touch on them here to clarify them since I expect they'll continue to show up in future posts. Seeing others reveals things about yourself and your culture -- and the more different they are, the deeper they reveal about you and your world. We take many parts of life for granted that aren't as universal as we suspect. Like a fish in water, we tend not to notice these things, which means they influence more strongly, since we think things are just that way. Since people are people everywhere, the more different a new culture, the more taken-for-granted things they reveal about us.…

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip... Here are some basic observations I saw in North Korea without embellishment or analysis. When I looked out my hotel room the first night we arrived to see about half the city, because of their dearth of electrical power I could count the number of cars driving: two. Buildings outside Pyongyang were bunker-like concrete slabs, many unfinished. Many people appeared to live in unfinished buildings. On the highway between Pyongyang and the Demilitarized Zone we passed two adjacent unfinished bridges falling into streams as if construction halted unexpectedly year ago, like ancient ruins. That highway was divided, with two or three lanes in each direction. For most of the roughly two-hour trip we saw no other vehicles than…

Continuing writing about my North Korea trip... One of this trip's major themes was the difference between expectations and experiences; also recognizing that expectations -- Americans have wild expectations of North Korea -- say things about yourself, not them. Experiences say something about the interaction between others and yourself. Americans, myself included, know little about North Korea and North Koreans. Our expectations tell us about what gets past the filters of their media and ours. The dominant expectations I hear Americans having of North Koreans are North Korea is dangerous and lawless The North Korean government jails westerners frequently for long times and tortures them The North Korean military is huge and omnipresent, goose-stepping about frequently The country is dreary and the people lifeless People…