Above My Pay Grade

"What do you make of a place like North Korea?" 

Say what? Rarely am I asked to opine on much of anything these days much less a matter with international ramifications of the most dangerous kind. 

I blurted something along the lines of being unable to understand that level of domination. How does that work, millions subjugated to that degree.

Then I trot out my pharaoh analogy. Don't you know there were kids playing with the young-pharaoh-to-be along the Nile who were smarter, faster, stronger, and then, hold on a minute, suddenly he's a god? Why? How?

(With the understanding no analogy is perfect, that one even less so.)

But I am warming to the task.

With nearly 8 billion individuals in the world, there's got to be a Kim Jong-un. With around 200 countries in the world, there's got to be a Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

But, no, I don't understand it. It's like with Putin. Do Russian 18 to 30-year-olds really want to die in Ukraine? How is it individuals--adults mostly I would think--are pulling triggers or pushing buttons that kill children, women, and men? Because they are told to do so?

On a certain level I think it all the psychology of the possible given the range of human behavior in the past and still possible now.

And we're talking 8 billion potentials out there.

I remember listening to an assistant principal fussing about the number of tardy referrals--around 90 as I recall--on his desk. Better tardies than fights I suggested. And with over 3000 students changing classes 5 times a day, well 90 didn't seem an epidemic. 

He, for lack of a more perfect word, grunted. So I tried the 3% of our students having a bad day gambit. That, too, would be 90 kids grinding axes to varying degrees.

That line of thought was No Sale.

Fortunately lunch arrived, and so my blather tabled.