Safe Trip, Miss Kim

Sometimes we just forget that, despite the risk that we might have as president soon a serial liar, one who sold her nation out for money while Secretary of State, it's actually still the USA, and there are far, far worse places to be.

I thought of this while at the car dealer's yesterday afternoon getting service on the old ride.  In the waiting room were a few chairs and a TV on the wall, which was showing the Olympics, which I was not planning to watch much of this time around, as I wrote here.

After the USA women's volleyball team was dispatched by Serbia in the semifinals and now heads to the bronze-medal consolation round, they were showing the semifinal round of women's platform diving, from some indeterminate height (anyone know what a "meter" is?).  Eighteen divers were going through six dives to qualify 12 of them for the final round, whenever that will be.

They all looked fine to me, and I am guilty of not being immediately able to recognize when a diver is "over-rotating" or was "short on that dive", and I can't count when a somersault is two-and-a-half or two.  Or three.  But they all looked really good, so I suppose they belong there.

At any rate, I couldn't help but notice that one of the divers who made it through to the finals was from a country whose Olympic competitive initials were "PRK" (by the way, two were from a country called "MAS", which you would have to have truly wracked your brains to have figured out stood for "Malaysia" -- but I digress).

"PRK", if you hadn't already figured out, is actually one of the easier ones to discern, since it stands for "People's Republic of Korea", which is used only in North Korea to refer to, of course, North Korea, that grand symbol of all that is wrong with human beings when given absolute power.

The young lady, a Miss Kim, who was actually doing the diving did well enough to make it into the finals as I mentioned, which sort of leads to why I thought this was worth a column, even if it's a bit short (hey, come on, we're packing to move and time is tight).

As I watched the poor girl doing her dive, I'm afraid I thought pretty much what half of America was thinking as they, too, watched her hurl herself off the platform from some indeterminate number of feet above the water.  And admit it, if you were watching, you were thinking the same thing:

If she doesn't make it to the finals, they're going to kill her.

Now, I suppose that's a bit of an exaggeration.  She might have been young enough to be in her first Olympics, maybe her first year of international competition even.  North Korea might give divers a couple years before they execute them if they don't do well enough.

But I sure as heck remember the Olympics in Beijing, which we used to call Peking, like the duck, until someone changed all the transliteration for some reason.  Do you remember the opening ceremonies, with all the people on the field in some kind of intricate, coordinated maneuver?  At least a thousand Chinese all doing the same thing at the precise moment.  Amazing.

I remember vividly watching that and thinking that, while it sure was beautiful to watch, it would not be a pretty death for any of those performers who lagged a second or two behind, or who turned left instead of right and messed up the perfect image that the successors to Chairman Mao were presenting, to show the world how wonderful China is these days.

By the way, they're called the "People's Republic" too.  Imagine the coincidence.

So as I watched the poor little North Korean diver, I was thinking that I was a pretty happy American.  I can't dive to save my life, and never could, but if I had ever risen to the heights of athletic prowess enough to have made an Olympic team in my remote youth, I'd have been pretty proud not to have had to have been, you know, fearful.

Had I been representing my country and screwed up royally, at least I would not have been worrying about the manner of my execution on my return, and how fast I could defect to the host nation.  More importantly, though, I would have known that people watching in other countries would have not been worrying about what would have happened to me.

It's called "freedom."  It's what happens when a country is, at least ostensibly, run by a government that has a responsibility to its citizens more than the other way around.  It's where the people can come and go as they please, as long as they obey the law (and in Hillary Clinton's case, even if they betray it and the country, in office, for personal gain).

No, I really didn't think that the little North Korean diver was going to be executed if she didn't make the finals.  At least I'm pretty sure she wasn't.

But we have those thoughts.  And the other guys, at least, aren't thinking them about the American athletes, even when they lose to Serbia in women's volleyball.

We're free.  Take a deep breath.  Appreciate it.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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