This week marked the deaths of two opposite personalities. Kim Jon Il, the reclusive leader of North Korea went to his reward only a few days after Vaclav Havel, the leader of Checkoslovakia's freedom from the Soviet Union and its first president. It might be instructive for us in the U.S. to study these two men since they represent two paths that we might very well follow.
Kim Jon Il stood for extreme secrecy, repression of dissent, control of the press and a rigid heirarchy that permitted a few people at the top to have almost unlimited wealth and power. He inherited his power from his father and expected to hand it down to his son. He felt that whatever power North Korea had came from his nuclear arsenal or, in the words of Marx, "from the barrel of a gun."
Havel was an author, a poet and a visionary. He stood for openness, free expression of thought in print and broadcast media and a more equitable distribution of wealth through maximum distribution of opportunity.
In America today, we have people who are quoted daily defending the right of the government to keep secret anything deemed important to national security. We are not told who deems it important or what facet of national security might be threatened. We hear daily from people who feel criticism of policy is treason. Newt Gingrich said he wanted judges who were overly liberal arrested. We hear about the one percent of Americans who own about 40% of the country's wealth. As our huge military budget shows, there are those who also believe that our security comes from the same gun barrel.
How many of us think a visionary or a poet is as valuable as, say, a football player or a rock singer? For that matter, as valuable as someone with no talent at all except being on a realty TV show? How do we feel about free expression if it doesn't jibe with the majority? And what about an adjustment in the unprecedented gap of opportunity in this country? Will we elect a Kim or a Havel? Or a combination of both?
We win some and we lose some. Oddly, as history shows, the people who seem to stick around longest are the ones like Havel. When the history books are written long after we join the goods and the bads, will it be the Gingriches that stick in the history books, or will it be the ones who carry forward the ideals that formed us in the first place?
And why on earth are these people so damn hard to find?