There’s much to love about America for unworldly young North Korean defector Yeonmi Park. The abundant food, of course, after having eaten insects and plants on her way to school as a child to stave off near-starvation.

Then there’s the blinding light of Times Square, after years in literal darkness; the dizzying freedom after being born under a dictator’s thumb; the open spaces; and the warmth of the people – which was especially poignant after being taught, for real, that Americans were literally cold-blooded reptilians.

But what’s even more remarkable, and a wakeup call for native-born Americans, is what most struck her since arriving for good in 2015.

“What I love most about the United States of America, both in theory and in practice,” she writes in her second book While Time Remains, “is its commitment to each individual’s unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“It’s difficult to communicate to Americans who were born here just how unusual that last right is as a value, let alone a value held by the state.

“Most countries are committed to either abstract ideas like the ‘glory’ or ‘majesty’ or ‘destiny’ of a people or government, or to something ruthlessly practical, like its own security or survival.

“But America is dedicated to the right of each inhabitant to try his or her best to be happy.”

Most Americans may not realize how close we’ve come in recent years to losing that American ideal of the individual as sovereign.

It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the outgoing presidential regime, in fine Marxist fashion, cares little about the individual. Its bread and butter, perhaps the very source of its power, has been dividing Americans into groups by race, class, gender and ideology.

The individual as collateral damage

Under such a twisted world view, individuals are meaningless – collateral damage to the supposed greater good, such as when you want to repopulate a country with foreigners who you think will behave in ways that solidify your power.

In such a world, Laken Riley – the 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was brutally assaulted and murdered Feb. 22 while jogging, allegedly at the hands of an illegal immigrant from Venezuela – is callously incidental to what is thought to be the greater good of mass immigration.

The left hates the sound of her name, and even the president famously got it shockingly wrong when goaded into saying it. They won’t take responsibility for letting her alleged killer into the country – or for flying him and others from a posh New York hotel to Atlanta on a free “humanitarian” flight.

Nor do they much care for acknowledging the growing number of Americans assaulted, robbed, raped and killed by illegal immigrants.

Mercifully, as much as anything, this election may have heralded the rise of the individual – a return to the sovereignty of the citizen that is a uniquely American birthright, thanks to our Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

It’s a world view that’s diametrically opposed to the one by which Americans have been governed the past four years, and for much of the past generation.

From self-governance to therapy ducks

Thus, it may take several generations to truly get back there, judging from the infantile meltdowns of some on social media following the election results.

Fact is, post-election sensibilities of the young were deemed so brittle that esteemed colleges such as Harvard and Georgetown canceled classes and offered students a day-care’s curriculum of Legos, crayons, milk and cookies, cocoa and therapy cats, dogs and ducks.

Rather than fidget spinners and rage rooms, perhaps what these tender reeds need, so bent by the shifting breezes of an election, is to be schooled in the vast vagaries of self-governance – the rare and joyous right of a free people to set their own course in national affairs.

Instead of Legos, why not hand these supposed scholars Yeonmi Park’s books, so they may learn what a historic anomaly it is to be free – as well as the high cost of the much-more-common alternatives?

Such liberty as Park has been introduced to here, well after childhood – and which she has come to appreciate and cherish more than her native-born fellow citizens – is hard to sustain, she warns, “unless the people themselves are committed to civic duty, individual responsibility, hard work, and a certain degree of personal virtue.”

Indeed, the distance from self-governance to comfort crayons can be measured in generations.