How well have we remembered..?
The 13th Amendment states Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
That was written in 1865. Right after a bloody war. Fast forward to the year 2011. And we have forgotten. The US has once again become a hotspot for slavery.We are a destination country for slave labor. Sure, we made the term a little fancier. We call it Human Trafficking (HT). But as I sat through a week of training on fighting against HT, I heard story after story, case after case, and statistic after statistic describing and detailing this growing, global industry that is slavery at its very core. We have truly forgotten who we are and what America is supposed to stand for.
HT is simply slavery. And it doesn’t look that much different from the slavery that led us to the Civil War. Remember that excerpt from part 1 detailed the life of a slave in early America? I updated it a little to describe what life is like for a slave in modern America.
The life of a slave is a life of hard work. Most slaves work 12-20 hours a day, seven days a week. Some slaves work in the “employers’” home cleaning, cooking, or taking care of the children. Some slaves work in the fields planting or picking tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables. Some slaves work our streets to provide “services” to paying customers.
Slaves live in cramped rooms with many other slaves. They own nothing and most often do not have access to their wages, documents or personal possessions. The slave owners feed them the least expensive food available – usually noodles and water. Meat is never eaten and most are constantly hungry. They are not allowed to leave.
Slaves are made to work by “traffickers.” These are men and women who manage the slaves and beat and abuse them if they d0 not work hard enough.
Once again we have deemed that we are too good to work in the fields and thus we exploit foreign workers to harvest and pick our fields. We have lost respect for our women and children and subject them to awful, disturbing crimes. And our country is one of the biggest perpetrators and suppliers of demand for modern-day slavery. We have forgotten our history. And sometimes its the very people that fight for our freedom today that are part of the reason so many are enslaved. What are we doing as a country? How have we so quickly forgotten that we came here and fought awful wars to gain and protect our freedom and the freedom of all men?
3,000 children are sold into HT every day. Over 1.2 million a year. 100,000 of those are children from our neighborhoods and sidwalks. US Citizens. Born with unalienable rights of life and liberty. Nicholas Kristof told a college assembly that sex trafficking of girls now is 10 times larger than the slave trade was before the Civil War. But its not the numbers that will change your mind. Its the face of a 12 year girl who is required to earn $500 on the streets tonight or she will be beaten and raped by her trafficker. Its the face of the laborer from South America who was promised a good paying job, but instead is beaten for not picking fast enough and hasn’t seen a dime of money in months. We have to wake up. We have to open our eyes. We cannot ignore the problem any longer or the values that so many men have lost their lives over will be nothing more than history themselves.
We need modern-day Harriet Tubmans. We need abolitionists. We need people who are willing to stand up and say “Enough is Enough!” People who will stop ignoring the reality that a country that should be a beacon of hope is becoming a country that is a haven for slavery. And we need people who are educated on the issue because most of the victims of this industry have no idea they are victims. Most think they are just in a bad situation, not that they are a victim of a crime prepetrated against mankind all across the world.
I will be one of those people. Will you? I will believe that this is not the end, that there is hope for a better world. I will fight for the freedom of ALL once again. Will you join me in that fight?
Check out The Polaris Project for more information on the fight against Human Trafficking in the US.
