Idle Hands

There's a lot that I could write about idle hands.  You know that saying, idle hands are the devil's tools, or whatever the saying is.  I find that to be mostly true and particularly relevant to human trafficking.  But right now I'm not going to go into that.  Instead I'm going to take a more circuitous route and talk about how wasting our time with ridiculous things harms the fight against human trafficking. 

For if you have idle hands, you probably aren't using your time wisely.  This is something that I know a whole lot about, especially recently.  Fortunately I don't think that I do a whole lot of mischief in any form when I have idle hands.  I do, however, play a lot of stupid on-line games when I have idle hands.  That and I read a lot about sports.  Of course there are times in our life when we need to unwind and calm ourselves, at which time playing games and reading about or following sports can be healthy, if not downright necessary.  At what point, though, do our idle hands grow addicted to such mindless activity?

I don't have the answer to that question.  All I know is that it's a necessary question: when our idle hands addict us to mindless, useless activities (80% of what we do on Facebook, Pinterest, ESPN, etc. is mindless and absolutely useless), we quite obviously will have less time to do something productive.  By "productive" I don't necessarily mean that anything tangibly productive is happening.  Productive activities can include reading the news (real news, not ESPN) or surfing the Internet (on useful websites like Polaris Project or IJM) or chatting up a friend (friends in Congress especially).  Doing any one of these activities can be productive in many ways.  In terms of human trafficking, these activities can be productive in keeping ourselves aware of the latest updates on our journey to eradicating the world of slavery.  And I don't know how often I have to say it, even to myself, but awareness of what's going on is a major first step.  G.I. Joe knew what he was talking about.  All we have to do is transfer our mindless addictions to mindless productivity.  It doesn't take that much energy to read or chat.

I'm as much to blame as anyone.  I have never been all that good at keeping up with human trafficking bills before Congress, news stories, or recent investigations into human trafficking.  Lately I have been particularly bad about it, though, as my idle hands have diverted much of my time and energy into the most useless and lazy life I can imagine.  When there are people out there needing our help, I and we can't let such things happen to us.  There are simple, productive, and much needed things that we can be doing to bring us closer to total liberation.