Slavery is an antique word.  Especially for me, a transplant from the north, living in the the state with the second most civil war battlefields.  Growing up, what I learned about slavery made it sound like it was a non-issue in Minnesota.  Here in Tennessee, we have slave houses preserved as historic places.  Slavery is not a current issue.

Except that I’m learning more and more that it is, and in ways more horrible than our plantation-owning forefathers even thought of it.  Where southern slavery was, in a lot of ways, a part of the economy of the south (this does not excuse it in any way, don’t get me wrong) human trafficking now often involves women and children being sold into sexual slavery.  Starvation and abuse are the norm.

I just started reading Lisa & Laura Ling’s Somewhere Inside tonight. If you’re not familiar with the story, Laura was captured by North Korean border guards while in China reporting on the plight of defectors from North Korea to China.  Through her family’s connections (she was working for Al Gore’s TV station at the time of her capture) she was freed, but after nearly eight months in captivity.  In the interest of protecting those she was there to report about, she destroyed all of the notes/video/audio from her interviews.

There are a few things about this that are really striking to me:

• Her descriptions of the abject poverty that the North Koreans are escaping to face near-certain poverty and hardship in China sound exactly like those of Mexican’s coming to the United States.
• This is the third in a series of human trafficking issues that have been brought to my attention IN THE LAST FOUR DAYS.  There is something going on here.
• We need more people willing to speak up for those who have no voice.
• I need to be one of those willing to speak up.