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Otto Warmbier

  1. MrsSCB

    pomelo / 5257 posts

    @looch: Yes, and that seems so hard for the family -- they will never have closure. Not that you can really get "closure" when you lose a family member, but I think not knowing what really happened to them would make it even harder

  2. Littlebit7

    nectarine / 2243 posts

    @pinkcupcake: yeah the tour company's motto/tag line was something like "we plan trips your parents wouldn't approve of". Um. Wtf.

  3. 2littlepumpkins

    grapefruit / 4455 posts

    My brother is his age (younger, actually) and I guarantee he knows that North Korea is a crazy dangerous place to go. He went to be adventurous according to his father. I also am not saying he deserved it, but saying he didn't know the risks seems a stretch.

  4. oldsoulmama

    coffee bean / 27 posts

    @Adira: He didn’t know how risky it would be to travel to NK? Seriously? I’m pretty sure Otto Warmbier knew full well what he was getting into when he signed up with a travel agency that advertised this trip as “budget travel to destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from” (their words, not mine). Clever marketing for curious college students that like to live on the edge.

    At 20, traveling to NK would be an exciting experience because it has the kind of forbidden mystique that college students love experiencing, including me, when I was that age. He may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, OR he really was goofing around and got caught for something silly, and NK decided to make an example out of him because hey, why not terrorize an American and broadcast his sentencing to the world to exert dominance? What more do you expect from a regime that is run by a man with mental issues worse than his father? Either way, the end result was tragic. Could it have been avoidable? Sure, he could’ve just not gone to NK at all, but really, how many Americans get killed in NK? Do you know how many Western college students travel to dangerous parts of the world and aren’t killed? A LOT.

    I'm on the fence about allowing my kids to travel to dangerous places. On the one hand I don't want them to live in a bubble, and I want them to see and experience what goes on outside of this country. My parents let me, but I feel like the world is much more hostile to Americans today than when I went.

  5. Adira

    wonderful pomelo / 30692 posts

    @oldsoulmama: How do YOU know what Otto knew with regards to the dangers of NK?

    I'm not saying he DIDN'T know. I'm just saying WE shouldn't just assume that he did. There's no way for us to know what he did or didn't know and therefore I won't judge his choice in this matter or assume he accepted all the real risks associated with that choice.

  6. Mrs. Lemon-Lime

    wonderful pea / 17279 posts

    @lamariniere: wow, that's a warning for you! What struck me was how many people that were at Otto's trial that looked like foreigners or at least not Korean. Are the people that get to stay and move about freely there complicit in this charade of justice?

    @snowjelez: Gov. Richardson sounded so deflated by what happened. Diplomacy only gets us so far.

    I wonder if the spotlight on NK right now makes it rougher on the other Americans detained there. I sure hope not.

  7. DesertDreams88

    grapefruit / 4361 posts

    In agreement that a college student who's paying thousands of dollars to travel across the world should know about the countries they are going to. Any basic Google search of NK should convince a reader not to go.

    Otto's death is no more tragic then the tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands??) Of native Koreans imprisoned and tortured and killed in NKs prison camps.

    NK is not a place to go for tourism or gawking..... or barely any reason. Too dangerous.

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