“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
–The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Sometimes I sing to myself, in my head; something lugubrious, mournful, Presbyterian:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
Could save a wretch like me,
Who once was lost, but now am found,
Was bound, but now am free.
I don’t know if the words are right. I can’t remember. Such songs are not sung anymore in public, especially the ones that use words like free. They are considered too dangerous. They belong to outlawed sects.
–The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
I thought for a long time before speaking again. “So these children are slaves,” I said. “They aren’t paid, and they have no other choice.”
“Well, you don’t have to put it like that,” Can said, with a clear scoff in her voice. “Nobody hurts them. Nobody fucks them. They’re safe and they’re taken care of. What more is there to childhood, anyway?”
I couldn’t answer her then, and I cannot now. In my travels, I have learned the same lesson again and again; every city as rich as Shy has that same flaw at its heart.
The life I live now is beautiful, but no one on Bambritch is entitled to the labor or the body of another. That is our one unshakable rule.
–The Book of Flora (The Road to Nowhere 3) by Meg Elison
In my dream, I was there when they took it. They burned houses and fields. They caught women and children and tied them up like cattle; they cut men down where they stood. They took apart the careful work of more than a hundred years in so little time.
Destruction is easy. Creation is so much harder.
Nowhere wasn’t much, but it was the first place I felt free. It was imperfect, but it was as if there was a piece of me waiting there, ready to join the whole, that I hadn’t even known about. I suppose that is why I dream it still.
–The Book of Flora (The Road to Nowhere 3) by Meg Elison
He yearned for escape with a desire that was near to insanity; awake and asleep it was his obsession; and he thought his heart had stopped when Squad-Leader Aras Dilley muttered to him, as Doremus was scrubbing a lavatory floor, “Say! Listen, Mr. Jessup! Mis’ Pike is fixin’ it up and I’m going to help you escape jus’ soon as things is right!”–It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.
“More and more, as I think about history,” he pondered, “I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”
–It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Vocabulary word for the day:
Disenthrall verb (used with object)
1. to free from bondage; liberate.
Vocabulary word of the day:
Freedom
the quality or state of being free: as
- the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action
- liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another
- the quality or state of being exempt or released from something onerous
a political or civil right
“The title of this conference was not chosen lightly,” continued Finigan-Carr, who is also director, Prevention of Adolescent Risks Initiative, and assistant director, Ruth H. Young Center for Families and Children. “Moving from awareness to response is really what we want. We need to do more than know human trafficking exists. We need to be able to respond, because the children that we serve, the youth that we serve, the citizens here in our state deserve us to be better, to do better.”
…
The school’s initiatives have led to:
- Support of the University of Maryland Support Advocacy, Freedom and Empowerment (SAFE) Center for Human Trafficking Survivors, which is a direct services, research, and advocacy center on human trafficking, created as result of the University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State initiative.
A 2016 study by the Center for Court Innovation estimated between 4,457 and 20,995 13- to 17-year-olds are involved in the sex trade in the United States. In Maryland, between July 2013 and June 2017, more than 350 cases of suspected child sex trafficking were reported by local departments of social services statewide.
…
Child victims of trafficking are recruited, transported, transferred, harbored, or received for the purpose of exploitation, Finigan-Carr continued, noting they may be forced to work in sweatshops, on farms, in traveling sales crews, in restaurants, hotels, brothels, or strip clubs, or for escort or massage services.
…
Other speakers included Maryland Assistant U.S. Attorney Ayn Ducao, who chairs the MHTTF and said when she started prosecuting human trafficking cases, she focused on the wrong questions.
“I focused on the question of ‘Why does the victim stay? Why didn’t she leave? Why doesn’t she seek help?’ ’’ Ducao said. In her first human trafficking case, the “she” was a 14-year-old sex trafficking victim.
“I came to realize those are the wrong questions to be asking,” she said. “You don’t ask a robbery victim, ‘Why did she let herself get mugged?’ We shouldn’t be asking the human trafficking victim. ‘Why do you let yourself get trafficked?’ as if that victimization was her choice.”
Progress in the Fight Against Child Trafficking, University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB) News, By Mary T. Phelan, December 15, 2017