can we talk about north korea for a minute? {serious tuesday}

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EDIT: I actually wrote this over a week ago, and forgot to post. Oopsies. But I'm totes posting it now cause YOLO

I know that North Korea is sort of old hat to some, now that The Boston Marathon incident happened and Justin Beiber visited the Anne Frank House. And to be quite honest, this post is simply the result of ruminating on several melodramatic/snarky comments I've heard from some of my peers over the past few weeks. {I've everything from "OMG when are the Koreans invading" to "ehhhh, let's just nuke them all and get it over with".}

And on a side note, it is totally irrelevant that I am procrastinating big time by writing this. {My first college level final? In 6 hours you say? Pssh, details, details.} 

Anywho, I suppose it's best to start at the beginning. Like how Kim Jong-un is only 29, and struggling to establish his command over North Korea. And how does a young, inexperienced leader prove himself to his country? By threatening to bomb South Korea, as well as the world's largest superpower {America} of course. Duh. 

But in reality, it's most likely just talk. North Korea is teeny compared to the U.S.; we have the military power to completely wipe NK out, and Kim Jong-un knows that -- hopefully. That being said, NK still is a threat since it's such an unstable country, and possesses nuclear weapons. NK is like a child that owns a bazooka. A very young, violent, and angry child. 

 So why don't we just go ahead and bomb them? Wouldn't nipping the problem in the proverbial bud be easier than bothering to put an anti missile base Guam, and moving U.S. destroyers to the western Pacific to monitor missile activity? Well yes, it would.

 But it's easy for us Americans -- who are glued to our Apple products and big macs -- to forget that most of the North Korean population is starving, and well below what we would consider the poverty line. {It's so bad, that approximately 2,500,000 North Korean citizens have died from starvation. Seriously, how is this a thing.}

Currently 200,000 North Koreans have been declared "an enemy of the state" and are being kept in concentration camps. It should be noted that if you are declared an enemy of the state, your ENTIRE FAMILY is also thrown into a Holocaust type concentration camp. And that punishment carries over for THREE GENERATIONS. That means that your children and your children's children grow up in these horrible places, and there's a 25% chance that they won't survive. There are people that were born in and will die in the same camp, because their grandparents sympathized with South Korea during the Korean War. How incredibly insane and horrifying is that?

So is North Korea going to nuke the U.S.? It's unlikely. Should we just go ahead and obliterate NK anyway? Heck no. North Korea is, in simple terms, a nation at the mercy of a corrupt, pig headed government. We should, in my opinion, be trying to help the NK citizens -- not demonizing them.

This post was brought to you by a plethora of ignorant comments that ticked Abby off. Thank you for reading.

~ Abby

Sources {check 'em out, they're pretty cool}:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRTjHJ93UYg
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50136263n
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm-tYxAwVO0
http://freekorea.us/camps/
http://www.businessinsider.com/life-in-north-korea-prison-camp-horror-kim-jong-un-2013-3?op=1