Night
before last, I had a disturbing, haunting dream. I dreamed I was working outside at the
apartment in the South Valley – a semi-rural, largely Mexican part of
town. (It used to be populated largely
by Americans of Mexican and Spanish ancestry, but that has changed – and is a
different story.)
In
my dream, a rough-looking man and a little girl came into the yard. The man
spoke to me in a heavy Mexican accent, and said, “You wanna buy a girl?”
I
thought he was kidding, and said, “Are you selling one?”
“Yeah,” he said, “This one,” and pushed her in front of him.
Still
thinking he was trying to make a point or run some kind of con, I went along
with him. I looked at her appraisingly,
and said, “Shoot, I wouldn’t give you more’n fifty bucks for that one.”
He
said, “Cash?”
“Sure. I’ve got that much cash.”
“Okay,”
he said, and held out his hand.
I
gave him fifty bucks. He shoved the little girl toward me and handed me a paper
sack with a few clothes in it, then spun and walked off up the street. I looked at her, then at him, and realized he
wasn’t kidding. “Hey, what the hell?” I
yelled at him.
“Well…” I couldn’t think of anything else to
ask. “What’s her name?”
“I
don’t think she has one. I just call her
Stupid,” and he was gone around the corner, walking rapidly, not looking
back. Not once.
I
looked at the little girl. She stood
erect, with her hands folded in front of her, eyes fixed on the ground about
ten feet away. She never spoke or looked
at me, and she never looked at the man. I gently stroked the back of her head and said,
“Well, come on in, then,” and walked inside.
Without a word or gesture, she followed me.
And
that’s all I remember of the dream, but that little girl has haunted me the
last two days. Where did such a vivid,
heartbreaking dream come from? Was it
some random data generator in my head, spitting out whatever insanity it came
up with? Then today, I was telling a
friend about the dream and suddenly realized the origin of it, and that is not
a different story.
On
Thursday, I was running some errands in Albuquerque, and in my travels, I saw
three billboards and two bus wraps that warned of “human trafficking.” This, of course, is a euphemism for human
slavery. One bus had a picture of a man
with a mustache, and the caption, “He wanted to take care of his family. Now he’s a slave.” Another had a wrap all the way down the side
that had pictures of women and children of different races in the windows, as
if they were looking out, with the caption “We are not for sale!”
When
I was in Texas a few years ago, I was struck by the fact that almost all
businesses had signs in their doors or windows reminding people that it is
illegal to traffic in human beings. I thought, “Maybe if they’d call it
slavery, folks would remember from their schooling that it was made illegal
some years back.”
We
never saw such signs until the last decade or so. I’m sure there has always been some trade in
humans, especially women and girls, from time immemorial, but it was never so
prevalent that we had to have billboards and signs in windows to remind people not
to buy or sell their neighbors – as you’d remind them to buckle up, or to shop
at Wal-Mart. I have wondered if we are
really and truly so… I don’t even know
what the word is, that we really need such reminders -callous… cynical…self-centered…uncaring
…isolated from reality…?
The
answer is pragmatically obvious, I guess.
If we were moral enough that we didn’t need the warnings, we would be
moral enough to not have the problem. If
people really understood what a horrible thing slavery is, only the most
barbaric and deviant among us would engage in it, and it wouldn’t be all that hard to
find them and string them up with their own entrails from a lamp post
somewhere. Maybe that would be more
effective, since if you talk to people about right and wrong, and they don’t
give a damn about it, you’re wasting your breath and money. Perhaps we should just say, “If you engage in
the slave trade, you will be lynched in your own guts.”
So,
apparently we do have the problem, although there is a distinct possibility that
the media and the moral mavens in the government – those who haven’t the guts
to say no to slavery, but, man, if you have an AR-15, they’re gonna be on you
like ugly on an ape – are making it up.
The press and the academics and the nannies have been known to
completely fabricate things in the past.
But intuition tells me there really is a problem with human slavery in
the oldest constitutional republic in the world – in the nation that once was
the beacon to all the world’s downtrodden – in the nation that was a city on a
hill.
We have, after all, seen the type of thinking
that enables such travesties. It has
been pushed at us from our pre-school
days, in ever-increasing intensity and sophistication, right through college
and beyond. The individual is
nothing. Culture is everything. Society is the supreme authority over the
individual. People only exist as sacrificial
goats, to be bled, by the state, for the benefit of Society. Women are just life support systems for vaginas,
and vaginas are just highways for more little welfare checks and tax
deductions.
Yeah,
I really do see it as being that dark.
And it tears me all to pieces. I’ve
always been real big on individual liberty, and the value of the individual
human being. Even when I was an atheist,
I could see that humanity is capable of the most sublime, heart-stopping virtue
and beauty, if they are left alone to flourish.
As I write this, I see in my mind my daughters, my grand- and
great-grandchildren, and my eyes are filling with tears. My darlings, I am so very, very sorry to have
allowed your world to become like this.
I was so foolish as to think it couldn’t really happen! Had I seen, when I was 30, what I see now, I’d
have taken a different path, and it would have been terrible, dark, and bloody.
And
it probably wouldn’t have made a flippin’ bit of difference.
Deo
Vindici
Rebsarge
Excellent piece of work!
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