North Korea, Social Justice, Animation, and the Option

During my trip last month to speak at a youth camp in North Carolina, I met Justin and Kira Wheeler, founders of The Option, a newly formed organization that seeks to engage the masses by providing creative outlets to share in telling the stories of North Korean refugees along with bringing them to safety through an underground networks across eastern Asia.

I admire their passion and willingness to focus on one of the most horrific humanitarian crisis around the world: North Korea; a country with hundreds of thousands suffering from poverty, oppression, political corruption, public executions, concentration camps, human trafficking, and diseases.

In their efforts to expose the reality of the crisis and highlight the stories of those fleeing the country, they have produced the following animation short to share the story of one such person who fled in hopes of finding freedom. I thought this animation short was well done, informative and powerfully invites the viewer to consider the story of one who is living in this reality.

We must never allow the magnitude of such an injustice to distance us from remembering the individuals that are directly affected.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flDrs4hGaWI]

Please visit their Facebook Cause page by clicking here. (Their website (www.theoption.org) is currently in development.)