One of the high school seniors that participated in a study trip that the Christian Church In Oklahoma sponsored this year opened his sermon (report to his home congregation that paid for most of his trip) with these words, “I am a 21st century slave owner and so are you.” The study topic for IAS was, “Faith and Economics: Consumption, Contentment, and Compassion.” We didn’t learn much about human trafficking that week, but what we learned about the treatment of workers in Bangladesh and other poor countries by multinational corporations that have home town names, Walmart for example, altered the world view of the group. The cold facts are that the gold and other minerals in my cell phone help underwrite regional wars between persons vying to control the natural resources (coltan, gold, diamonds, oil, other precious metals and gemstones) of poor countries. What I know is that little of I was wearing back in March, or even today, was made in the United States with materials from the United States, not even my Wrangler Jeans or shirt. Wrangler! Can it have a more western name, but not made in the USA.
I follow Nicholas Kristof’s investigative reporting for the New York Times and recently he has been looking into the sex slave trafficking that exists, the preys on the poor by offering a few hundred dollars for their girls and their boys. His reporting has been heart breaking, surreal, and at moments while reading I’ve thought that they should just scoop up these children in the night and put them on a plane to anywhere but where they are. It is hard for a white westerner to grasp what it must be like to be a lower caste or sub-caste member in India, though walking in Vegas, LA or NY, any major city really, you get a sense of our own American caste system though we “class” it up. This kind of trafficking in children and adults no doubt happens to Americans as well as people of other nationalities. Oppression and rape happen whether there is forced sex involved of not. How do we break the consumption cycle?
She’s 10 and May Be Sold to a Brothel
Nicholas Kristof | The New York Times | June 1, 2001
KOLKATA, India
M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel.
Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well. And M. has the extra burden that she belongs to a subcaste whose girls are often expected to become prostitutes.
What I do know is that it is surreal that these scenes are unfolding in the 21st century. The peak of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the 1780s, when just under 80,000 slaves a year were transported from Africa to the New World.
These days, Unicef estimates that 1.8 million children a year enter the commercial sex trade.
So, it is no surprise I would be called a liberal by many, friend and other alike. I like words and what they mean. I have issues with how the meaning of some words and phrases has been watered down, co-opted or are now outright slurs. Words in culture: liberal or conservative; hero or courage. In my vocation, “the priesthood of all believers”, ordination, education, and Christian.
Courage. If the federal deficit is the problem that must be fixed, then our political leaders in the House of Representatives should begin with their own salaries and benefits rather than with those with no voice in our system. If private insurance is not expensive and easy to attain, then one way to cut the budget is to end the benefits of elected representatives and that of their staffs. Non-capital hill federal employees would keep their benefits. Courage: every representative would give up their salaries and perks as the first wave of “budget cutting” and apply that to deficit reduction before touching one penny of spending for the social safety net. But, they will not. That takes courage. The Republican party will continue to argue that tax breaks for the top 2% of earners and for multinational corporations are somehow going to stimulate the economy, but as of yet that has not happened. How much longer and how much more money do they need to prove this will work? All the data says that is does not. The truly wealthy do not pay income tax, really. These folks make their money on capital gains from money making money. Many do not make or create a thing other their their own wealth. That is what the system promotes. What counts for political courage these days? Apparently, acting like Lord of the manor, legalizing discrimination, and growing the class of working poor so that labor is cheap here and abroad; and military service a plausible escape from poverty. Is that courage or privilege?
Real Political Courage
Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Washington Post, Post Opinion | May 31, 2011
There was a time when this is how we defined political courage in America: a politician standing up for deeply held principles, in opposition to his party and a popular president, regardless of consequence. But today, we have adopted a new and distorted definition of political courage, one that rewards those who claim to be making hard choices, when in truth there is nothing hard about what they’ve chosen.
Case in point: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan has been called courageous, a hero of sorts, by members of his party, by members of the media and even by some Democrats. And what is it that Ryan so bravely did in order to receive the outsized praise heaped upon him these past two months?
He proposed a federal budget that, in every respect, articulated extremist Republican ideology. He balanced the budget using faulty assumptions that no respected economist outside the Heritage Foundation has called reasonable. And he did it by slashing health-care benefits for the elderly and the poor, for children and the disabled, all while giving $4 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
If we applaud false courage, we’ll only get more of it, and less of the real thing, at a time when we need real courage more than ever. Solving this problem, then, must be a shared responsibility. It is the media’s obligation, as much as it is our own as citizens, to highlight genuine political courage for what it is, and to reject Ryan-style courage for what it isn’t.