FreedomDay March 25, 2007
One Voice, One Act to End Slavery
Human beings are not for sale. Slavery in any form should never be tolerated in my own community or anywhere in the world. I will live in a way that sets the captives free and unbinds the chains of injustice.
I am an abolitionist.
These words come from the liturgy/pledge of Freedom Day, March 25 at Vanguard University where many people gather on behalf of those who are enslaved. The goals for the gathering are to bring awareness of modern-day slavery, provide an environment for networking, and create opportunities for action. In the face of 27 million who are enslaved, one wonders what one can do.
Students do a variety of things to raise money: create paintings, make jewelry, or sell totebags, T-shirts, and cookbooks. Attendees make their way to learning sessions. Dr. Siroj Sorajjakool (colleague) leads out in one of these sessions.
The courtyard fills with efforts at fundraising. Suddenly two young men run up some stairs and turn on a sound system, as if to remedy the unintended lack of background noise. The words to a familiar song blare from one story above:
Every breath you take/Every move you make/Every bond you break/Every step you take/I’ll be watching you
Every single day/Every word you say/Every game you play/Every night you stay/I’ll be watching you
O can’t you see/You belong to me….
The song by Sting seems inappropriate somehow. It reminds me of a time a caller phoned an easy-listening station between love songs. In soft and empathetic tones the announcer listened and responded to the caller as she tearfully told her story of escape from a bad relationship and a man who controlled and frightened her. She was eager for a new life and wanted a song to help her find new love, away from the fearful environment. The song began.
Every breath you take/Every move you make/Every bond you break/Every step you take/I’ll be watching you…
It was the wrong song for the moment. After the song concluded, the announcer confessed, “That probably was not the best song to play. I’m sorry about that” and moved on. It is easy to see what happened. The music was probably chosen from a category without further thought of this particular caller. And so it is easy to forgive, but the point stands. Victimization walks among us in ways that prevent us from seeing its face.
The film, Fields of Mudan, breaks our hearts with a truth too horrible to see or believe. “If we know this is happening, then why can’t we do something?!” A young woman in the audience asks the same question twice and her ernestness is palpable. It is a question easily understood in the Western world. If we know the problem, then we should be able to fix it, rectify it somehow. Easily missed is that the very clothes on our backs and the cars we drive help establish this problem. We help define wealth and this definition makes extreme poverty unbearable. “What would make a mother or father willing to sell a child?!” Of course we cannot understand. We never have to ask the question, except of others, never of ourselves.
