A little article on what I've been doing lately: New England Annual Conference UMC News

Slavery Footprint

Not long after my last presentation on my book and human trafficking, one of my parishioners let me know how horrified she is that she has around 100 slaves working for her.  She figured this out by looking at slaveryfootprint.org, an excellent website to learn more about how we can tangibly reduce our slavery footprint (like a carbon footprint).  My wife said the same thing when she discovered that she had over fifty.  Some of the questions are hard to answer accurately or refer to one-time purchases and may skew the actual result, but the conclusion remains the same: OH NO!

The purpose of slaveryfootprint.org is not to alarm you.  The purpose is to inform you.  Of course, your alarm serves a purpose, too, in that once you see how terrifying your slavery footprint is you’ll be more likely to want to change.  The website then gives you a bunch of detail on what goes into your slavery footprint so that you can adjust your lifestyle and choices accordingly. 

 Even then the number will probably remain high.  I suppose that I am slightly more simplicity-oriented in life and slightly more informed on slavery than the average Westerner, and so I have made slight adjustments to reduce my slavery footprint, and yet I still have thirty-seven or slaves working for me.  At the end of the day, even if we entirely remake our lives to limit our footprint, we probably won’t eliminate our footprint until we also influence society to remake itself.  That’s an unfortunate truth, but we know it’s true looking at how we reduce our carbon footprint.  If we ride our bikes everywhere we go, don’t use electricity or have solar panels that cover our electric usage, and have geothermal systems to heat and cool our homes, we’d still have a carbon footprint (which is sad, considering how expansive and demanding these changes to our lives I’ve listed are).  How?  Well, where do we buy our food?  Is it all local?  If not—and it’s almost surely not because in most places it’s actually impossible to only buy local and still eat anywhere near healthy—then we have a carbon footprint because our food had to be transported.  Dangit!  We’d then have to change the way our society produces and distributes food to completely eliminate our footprint.  One example of at least a handful.  Another example: do we use paper? If yes, is it hemp paper?  If no, and it’s paper made from wood, then we are contributing to the rise in carbon dioxide in the environment because trees breathe on carbon dioxide.  Moral of the story is simple: we must make radical changes to our own lives and also make radical changes to how society operates.

 Moral of the moral: go to slaveryfootprint.org and learn how you can make a difference with, often, simple life changes.  Find out how many slaves are working for you and how exactly you can reduce that number.  Remember, a law of economics is that supply always seeks to meet demand.  If we limit demand then we limit supply.  And when we consider that the supply consists of human beings, each and every one of whom deserve dignity and respect, then we should get to work.  We also see that sometimes a product can look so enticing that having a supply creates demand, but that side of economics relates more to societal changes and that comes later.

 One quick lesson to take away with you, especially if you don’t go to slaveryfootprint.org right after reading this: don’t upgrade your cell phone.  Or, at the very least, make sure that you recycle your phone in a place that will properly reuse the parts of the phone.  All cell phones, the way they are made today, require the use of a metal the mining of which, at the moment, uses slave labor.  Upgrade your phone and don’t recycle the old one and you are using slave labor.  Unless your current phone is broken, why do you need to upgrade it anyway?  What’s up with that?  Take better care of your cell phone in the first place, too.  Even if we recycle our current phones, the rate at which we buy and upgrade our cell phones is not sustainable using recycled product only.  If it works, keep using it; if you’re behind the times, so what?  The “times” aren’t so kind to 27 million slaves.

Worst Evil

Recently I've done a number of presentations on human trafficking and my bike trip.  Human trafficking and my bike trip always go hand in hand when I do presentations because most of my unique contributions to the fight against slavery--my reflections to help ordinary folk change their lives to combat the evil--come directly from my bike trip.  Anyway, during the presentation I always discuss how and why I think human trafficking is the worst evil imaginable.  Well, at one of the presentations a community member posed the question: "Isn't child abuse the worst evil imaginable?"  I was suddenly struck dumb.  In many cases, child abuse is related to child slavery in one form or another, but is child abuse and child molestation that is not considered trafficking actually a worse evil?

To be honest, I don't think the answer to the question matters.  Perhaps child abuse not related to trafficking is a worse evil.  That a parent could mentally or physically harm his or her own child on purpose blows my mind, especially he or she does so for some self-gratification.  Yet, as I say with pornography, I don't think that we can say there is such a thing as child abuse not related to human trafficking.  Any parent who does abuse/molest a child clearly does not view the child as a dignified human being.  Any person who uses another person for gain, as a slave, clearly does not view the slave as a dignified human being.  There's a reason why, during the African slave trade, slave owners did not want the slaves to become Christian: the owners would then have to view the slaves as dignified human beings.  If we all were to perceive our brothers and sisters in this world as dignified then there wouldn't be slavery.  So, in my book, anything that encourages someone to view another human being as not a human being is related to human trafficking.

Really, the inability to perceive all other persons as dignified and worthy of respect is the worst evil in our world.  It takes different forms but they are all related.  And it's all horrifying. 

Friends, if we want to combat human trafficking, we need to start treating one another better.  That starts with how we talk about our fellow persons.  We can't go on-line and post at the end of articles and call people creepy, idiots, ****heads, or otherwise people who don't deserve to breathe and then say, "I can't believe there are people out there who use slaves."  Well, simply by talking like we reject the rules of decency demotes culture's perception of humanity.  I mention posts at the end of on-line articles because I see that often and it's disgusting.  Indeed, on my other blog an anonymous person posted some rather demeaning statements about me.  Now, I'm not saying that we need to be nice to everyone.  Sometimes we need to have some difficult conversations with one another.  Dialogue often needs to happen so that one or more people can start acting better.  But we should always be polite and respectable because the people we are talking to and about are human beings.  In all seriousness, this simple change in cultural attitude will make a serious difference.

Sen. McAllister

I haven't written in a while.  Unfortunately the motivation for writing now is a local case of trafficking.  Since I moved to Swanton, Vermont, away from the city (by Vermont standards, anyway) of South Burlington a few months ago, I thought that I had moved away from the high-danger zone for trafficking.  Of course, I knew better: trafficking can happen anywhere at any time.  The contributing factors of human trafficking exist everywhere: poverty, desperation, humans--who have the potential to be monsters.

Last week, a Vermont news story broke here in Franklin County, Vermont.  A state senator named Norm McAllister, a resident of the town over from Swanton, was taken from the statehouse in Montpelier into custody on charges of sexual assault and prohibited acts, aka human trafficking.  McAllister is accused of taking advantage of his tenants and women who worked for him.  Some might classify what McAllister did as a "light" form of human trafficking.  He did not physically enslave anyone nor did he threaten anyone's life.  Yet that doesn't lighten the monstrosity of what McAllister did: coercing women to perform unwanted sexual acts so that they wouldn't be kicked out onto the streets.  I have spent a lot of time thinking and reflecting on what pushes someone to do what McAllister did and so on some level I understand it, no matter how disgusting and appalling it is.  What I cannot understand, however, is that in public McAllister was an advocate for the poor, saying earlier in his legislative career that he is concerned for the poor because he sees how difficult it is for his tenants to pay the rent.  Essentially what he was saying, then, is that his reason for caring for the poor is that he takes sexual advantage of his tenants because they struggle to pay the rent.

No matter how often I have written and said that people who use and abuse slaves are humans just like the rest of us, meaning mostly that we should reflect inward on ourselves rather than only lash out at perpetrators, and no matter how often I have said that users and abusers will publicly look and act like the rest of us, I have come to a point where I give up.  I don't give up in trying to fight human trafficking but I give up in trying to understand.  I do not understand how a person can publicly say, "I see my tenants struggle to pay the rent and I care for them," and then privately take advantage of them, forcefully invade their bodies, and perhaps irreparably harm their mental and emotional space.  I have been going around saying the last few days, "I understand a lot of things, but I don't understand how he could do that."  I do not understand.  Many times I have written that we humans often create a Jekyll/Mr. Hyde scenario in which our public and private lives are vastly different and our public mind almost doesn't know what the private self is doing.  I can almost guarantee you that to some extent you do the same.  I certainly do.  In that sense, I understand; I understand McAllister's motivation; but I do not understand how he could publicly express concern for his tenants while actively abusing them and trying to prostitute them.

I suppose what this should teach us is that we can never know when we might encounter an abuser.  So many times I have said that trafficking can and probably does exist right around the corner from where we live (even if we need to define "corner" as forty minutes away), but today I want to focus on the persons involved.  Often we think of trafficking as an object: some thing that exists.  When we think that way, it's easier for us to believe that we and our loved ones will never become a victim.  Certainly, I don't want to scare us into thinking we'll become a victim, but the likelihood of our becoming a victim probably increases when we think, "If I only avoid that dangerous neighborhood, that spa, that place..."  Human trafficking is not a thing and it is not a place.  Human trafficking involves persons and is perpetrated by persons.  Many of the 27 million slaves--trafficked persons--in the world were lured in by a person (I would say all except that some are still born into slavery like on U.S. plantations in the old days and some are kidnapped without any warning signs).  And because the perpetrators will publicly look and act like the rest of us, we should be aware of how prevalent human trafficking is and should be aware of our resources.  Victims are no longer treated as criminals.  Victims shouldn't be embarrassed to seek help, even when the perpetrator seems powerful, like Sen. McAllister.  We should feel confident to call 9-1-1 and, better, we should know these phone numbers: 888-3737-888 (National Human Trafficking Hotline); 888-984-8626 (Vermont Human Trafficking Hotline); and 2-1-1 (United Way of Vermont).  We should also review this website: Polaris Trafficking Resources.  If we find ourselves coerced or duped into a violating situation by someone that we thought we could trust or someone who has power over us, then we should know where to go.  Thank God that the victims of Sen. McAllister eventually sought help in the right places.

While my main theme usually is that we need to look inward to make sure that we don't ever use or abuse, or somehow contribute to human trafficking, and thereby eliminate trafficking one person at a time, I'm now thinking that there may be some people who are so far gone that such a tactic won't work.  If that's true, then the rest of us need to be aware of our resources to help ourselves and help others from "a crime so monstrous."

(It is, of course, important to note that Sen. McAllister has not been proven guilty.  He has plead not guilty.  A charge or accusation does not equal guilt, no matter how strong the evidence.  A court of law must decide guilt.  However, in this case, a determination of guilt should not be necessary for us to realize how important it is to know our resources as we grow aware that trafficking can and does occur in all places and at the hands of all sorts of people.)