Seven deliberate questions

Are you having a rough day?

Did the boss yell at you (again), or were you furloughed or downsized?

Maybe your car broke down on the way to work?

Did you skip breakfast and lunch?

Was supper not to your liking?

Have you ever heard of Shin Dong-hyuk or Chen Guangcheng?

Do you know how to use an online search engine such as Google?

For full disclosure on these seven questions:

• Yes, there have been times when I thought I had had a rough day.

• There have been times when a boss yelled at me. (The last time was in the early 1980s when the late Bill Bushelman did this at Rotary Forms Press, Inc. He and I came to an agreement whereby he never did it again. A decade later, we laughed about the entire episode. No one else has dared to yell at me.)

• Indeed, my car has broken down on my way to work. Recently, in fact. (Years ago, my car broke down in Portsmouth, halfway across the old 73 bridge above the Scioto River. Without assistance, I pushed the old clunker into the Boneyfiddle District carryout's parking lot and left it there. You can't make this stuff up.)

• Yes, I have skipped breakfast and lunch – my expanded waistline, notwithstanding.

• I know far better than to criticize supper in my house. That ain't happening.

• I have heard of Shin Dong-hyuk and Chen Guangcheng.

• As much as I detest its usage as a verb, I can Google.

And after reading about Shin Dong-hyuk and Chen Guangcheng this week, one thing I am certain of is this: For the vast majority of us, life is pretty good.

Whether you are rich, poor, or somewhere in that glorious middle of the United States of America, you've got it better than either Shin Dong-hyuk or Chen Guangcheng.

Let's look at it.

• Shin Dong-hyuk has shared his life story, "Escape from Camp 14," with Blaine Harden of The Washington Post.

If all accounts of the story are accurate, Shin came into the camp by birth. His conception was a "reward," of sorts to his inmate "parents."

Writing for National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com), Joseph A. Rehyansky, who is retired from the United States Army and the Chattanooga district attorney’s office, says: "Shin is believed to be the first person born in such a camp ever to escape. His family was there because his father’s two brothers fled south during the Korean War. Until his escape, Shin was always infested with lice. There was never any water for bathing or even a way to brush one’s teeth. Everyone smelled like a farm animal, so no one else was bothered by the odor. The camp diet was corn, cabbage, and salt. Pellagra was a common cause of death. To this day, the only fertilizer generally available in the camps and in the country as a whole is human excrement."

About that corn diet, by the way. Shin says the corn was often first digested by the livestock.

Rehyansky continues: "At age 14, (Shin) watched as his mother was hanged and his brother faced a firing squad: He hated them. She would beat him when he stole her food, and he had seen her cooking rice, an unheard-of delicacy, for his brother. When Shin overheard his mother and brother planning an escape, he dutifully reported it to a guard, but the guard took credit for uncovering the plan, so Shin and his father were tortured in a hidden underground dungeon for months in the certainty that they had known of the plan and had not reported it. Shin was suspended by ankle and wrist shackles over hot coals. When he writhed away from the heat, his torturer slammed a hook into his pubic area to hold him in place."

"Shin had escaped at the right time," Rehyansky writes. "Famine was an ally. Ten percent of the population of Hamhung, North Korea’s second-largest city, had starved to death. Another 10 percent wandered away in search of food. Even in Pyongyang, the home of the “privileged,” people were found dead of starvation in their apartments."

When Shin was 20, he accidentally dropped a sewing machine in the prison. The North Korean guards gave him a friendly reminder that such conduct was not acceptable: They chopped off one of his fingers.

Today, Shin says that "South Koreans as a whole are too occupied with getting and spending in their prosperous, stressful, competitive society to be concerned with the fate of North Koreans."

South Koreans are not alone with this preoccupation.

* * *

• Chen Guangcheng's personal ordeal has been well documented by Jay Nordlinger, the managing editor of National Review (the world's greatest fortnightly magazine).

After greatly exaggerated reports of his death, "Many people in the world regard Chen as one of the greatest men we have known in the last decade," Nordlinger said.

"Chen was born on Nov. 12, 1971, in the Linyi area of Shandong Province. When a year old, he contracted a fever, which left him blind. Just a peasant, he educated himself, including in the law. He was ready and available to help people. Jianli Yang, a dissident now in America, calls him a “born leader,” someone who has always cared for others and whom others respond to.

"To the extent he could, Chen helped the disabled petition for their rights. He helped farmers, too. In the worldwide press, he has been known as the 'blind lawyer,' or the 'barefoot lawyer,' or the blind 'rural activist.' Many Chinese throughout the country know him simply as 'the blind man.'"

Imagine, for just a moment, this blind man working on behalf of the disabled as if he had no disability, himself. To put it mildly, that is "putting service before self."

Nordlinger continues: "What gained (Chen) his fame, and torment, was his exposure of one fact: In the year 2005 alone, in just the Linyi area, there were 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations. These procedures are brutal. Moreover, relatives of those who escaped the procedures were detained and tortured. Harry Wu, a long-famous dissident working in America, says that few outside China really understand the consequences of the one-child policy. Jing Zhang, another dissident, associated with the Boston-based group All Girls Allowed, points out that Chen touched one of China’s most sensitive nerves."

In a video released this year, Chen said, “A society that is not built on a foundation of fairness and equality, but instead relies on bullying and violence, cannot possibly maintain lasting stability.”

As a member of the Master Printers of America, I like to think there's a good reason why the German printer Johannes Gutenberg was declared "The Man of the Millennium."

Gutenberg was, of course, the first in the West to print by using movable type and a printing press.

Without the press (and, now, today's electronic media) how many of us would consider Chen's words?

“A society that is not built on a foundation of fairness and equality, but instead relies on bullying and violence, cannot possibly maintain lasting stability.”

Rory Ryan is publisher of the only locally owned newspaper in Highland County.